SC-900 Practice Question: Describe the capabilities of Microsoft compliance solutions
A company is involved in a legal case and must preserve all emails and documents sent by a specific employee (custodian) that are related to a particular matter. The legal team needs to collect this data into a tamper-proof container for review, ensuring that no original items are modified or deleted. Which Microsoft Purview solution should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse eDiscovery (Standard) with eDiscovery (Premium) because both involve searching for content, but only Premium offers custodian management and legal hold capabilities required for preserving data in a tamper-proof container for legal cases.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
eDiscovery (Premium)
eDiscovery (Premium) is the correct solution because it provides advanced capabilities for legal investigations, including the ability to place a legal hold on specific custodians (the employee) and preserve all relevant emails and documents in a tamper-proof container. This ensures that no original items are modified or deleted during the review process, meeting the requirements of the legal case.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Retention labels
Why it's wrong here
Retention labels apply policy-based retention and disposition settings to items like emails and documents, ensuring data is kept or deleted according to organizational policies. While they prevent premature deletion, they are not designed for the dynamic, targeted, and auditable preservation required for specific legal cases. Retention labels lack the integrated custodian management, granular control, and case-specific data collection features essential for a legal hold scenario.
- ✗
eDiscovery (Standard)
Why it's wrong here
eDiscovery (Standard) offers foundational capabilities for identifying, preserving, and exporting content in response to legal requests, including basic content searches and placing holds on mailboxes and sites. However, it falls short for complex legal cases as it does not provide integrated custodian management, advanced indexing, conversation threading for platforms like Microsoft Teams, or the structured review sets and analytics crucial for efficiently processing large volumes of data from multiple sources for a specific legal matter.
- ✓
eDiscovery (Premium)
Why this is correct
eDiscovery (Premium) is the comprehensive solution for managing legal, regulatory, and internal investigations within Microsoft 365, providing end-to-end data preservation, collection, and analysis. It offers robust capabilities including integrated custodian management, targeted legal holds across various data sources, advanced indexing, conversation reconstruction for platforms like Microsoft Teams, and secure review sets with analytics. This allows for efficient identification, collection, processing, and analysis of relevant data, ensuring defensible preservation and streamlined review for complex legal matters.
- ✗
Data Lifecycle Management
Why it's wrong here
Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) focuses on automating the retention and deletion of data across an organization based on predefined policies and classifications, primarily to manage data growth and meet general compliance requirements. Its purpose is to ensure timely disposition or long-term retention according to broad rules. While it includes retention policies, DLM is not designed to handle the specific, dynamic, and auditable requirements of a legal hold, which necessitates identifying specific custodians, placing targeted holds, and managing case-specific data collection and review processes.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Microsoft Entra ID
Key term
eDiscovery
eDiscovery is the process of identifying, collecting, and producing electronic information for legal cases or investigations.
Key term
Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance and compliance service that helps organizations discover, manage, and protect their data across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
About these practice questions
This SC-900 question is part of Courseiva's 1,250-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SC-900 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SC-900 exam.