How To Use Microsoft Purview for eDiscovery Solutions

As litigation, internal investigations, and regulatory inquiries become more frequent and complex, legal and compliance teams are expected to respond faster, more precisely, and with fewer resources. Microsoft Purview has become the go-to solution within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, but is it enough on its own? Purview supports the discovery and management of electronically stored information (ESI) by enabling targeted searches across emails, Teams chats, SharePoint documents, and OneDrive files. Teams rely on it to build eDiscovery cases, apply legal holds, scope their searches with precision, and export relevant data for further analysis or legal review.

What Purview Offers Legal and Compliance Teams

The value of Purview lies in its native integration and centralized control. It brings together the tools necessary to meet a broad range of compliance scenarios within Microsoft 365, offering a consistent interface and experience. Users can scope legal matters with precision by defining custodians, content locations, and filters such as date ranges and keywords. Search results can be reviewed and tagged for relevance, and data can be exported in various formats for downstream processing.

Many teams appreciate how Purview is embedded directly into Microsoft’s ecosystem. It allows legal departments to engage with IT administrators through a unified compliance center and reduces the need for external tooling, at least on the surface. For investigations, HR matters, FOIA requests, or litigation responses, Purview offers baseline capabilities that are especially appealing to organizations seeking an integrated starting point within the Microsoft ecosystem, while leaving room to enhance their workflows with purpose-built solutions as complexity increases.

The Broader Role of Purview in Compliance Workflows

Beyond eDiscovery, Purview is also used for information governance, insider risk management, data loss prevention, and regulatory compliance monitoring. It acts as a central policy engine across Microsoft 365 workloads, offering features such as retention policies, audit logging, and role-based access controls. When properly configured, it helps organizations demonstrate defensibility in court and with regulatory bodies.

However, as data volumes grow and the scope of compliance needs broadens, many organizations have begun to feel the pressure of Purview’s Structural Limitations. The more advanced the use case, the more obvious these limitations become, particularly around indexing, exporting, and working with third-party data. What starts as convenience can quickly become a constraint.

Where Purview Begins to Fall Short

Despite its promise, many organizations discover that Purview’s core capabilities often come with Hidden Limits, ones that become increasingly evident when the demands of legal or regulatory matters intensify.

One of the most common pain points is incomplete indexing. Large or complex files are often only partially indexed, meaning that important data may be excluded from search results. For example, emails with too many attachments, oversized Excel spreadsheets, or documents with excessive character counts often slip through the cracks. Hyperlinked files can also present issues; if a document links to another stored elsewhere in the environment, that linked content may not be fully indexed or preserved within the case context. This gap can result in key evidence being missed or separated from its original context. Legal teams must then conduct manual reviews or perform separate exports, adding time and risk.

Export limitations also pose serious bottlenecks. Purview restricts individual case exports to 2TB and enforces daily export caps across the entire tenant. Export speeds are also throttled, often making it difficult to retrieve large volumes of data quickly, especially under tight deadlines. For time-sensitive cases or regulatory inquiries, these delays often have costly consequences.

Data integration remains another significant challenge. While Purview supports third-party connectors, setting them up is costly, technically demanding, and often requires reshaping external data into “email-like” formats. The result is a fragmented dataset that lacks native context, making it harder for reviewers to make informed legal decisions.

Even legal hold management can become unwieldy. Limits on the number of custodians or sites per hold require teams to set up multiple overlapping holds, creating a confusing and error-prone environment. Once a hold is lifted, resuming the correct retention policies isn’t always seamless, leading to the risk of data over-retention or loss.

While Purview handles the basics, it ultimately struggles under real-world conditions. Legal and compliance teams need more agility, precision, and speed than the platform currently delivers.

Introducing Expireon: The Natural Next Step

To meet the scale, scope, and sophistication required by modern discovery workflows, organizations are turning to Expireon. Expireon is a purpose-built solution designed to extend Microsoft Purview’s capabilities and eliminate its limitations.

Expireon resolves indexing concerns by enabling full-text indexing on all content types, regardless of size or complexity. Whether you're working with multi-gigabyte Excel files or deeply nested emails, Expireon captures it all, ensuring no critical data is left out of search results.

Exporting data is equally seamless. With no size limits or speed restrictions, Expireon enables fast, complete exports that can be executed on demand. What might take days using Purview alone can often be completed in hours or less with Expireon. Expireon also preserves data in its native format, maintaining full metadata and contextual integrity. This is especially important when dealing with data from collaboration platforms like Slack or Teams, where context is essential. Rather than transforming content into emails, Expireon keeps the structure intact, allowing for accurate, contextual review.

Legal hold workflows are streamlined and made more intelligent. Holds can be applied across thousands of custodians, override retention schedules, and revert to original policies automatically when released. This ensures legal defensibility without creating unnecessary data retention burdens. Expireon’s architecture is built for compliance from the ground up. With WORM (Write Once, Read Many) storage, robust audit trails, and regulatory support, including SEC 17a-4, Expireon provides peace of mind in even the most highly regulated industries.

Make Microsoft Purview Work Smarter

Microsoft Purview is an excellent foundation for eDiscovery and data governance. But as organizations face more demanding compliance environments, higher data volumes, and increasingly tight deadlines, the baseline is no longer enough.

Expireon enhances your existing investment in Microsoft 365 by delivering the speed, scale, and control modern discovery demands. It turns a capable compliance tool into a truly enterprise-ready eDiscovery platform, without adding complexity or duplicating systems.

Together, Purview and Expireon offer a best-of-both-worlds solution that ensures your data is discoverable, exportable, and defensible, even in the most demanding and multifaceted cases.

Ready to Evolve Your eDiscovery Strategy?

If you’re already using Microsoft Purview or evaluating your compliance stack, you need to assess whether your tools are keeping up with your demands or if they are exposing you to unnecessary risk. Schedule a consultation with our team today and explore how Expireon can transform your discovery, compliance, and data governance workflows.