Microsoft’s latest move to unify its eDiscovery experience in Purview is designed to simplify compliance workflows. But for legal and IT teams working under pressure, “unified” doesn’t mean “complete.” In this article, we break down what’s new in Purview and where serious limitations remain for enterprise legal operations.
Microsoft Purview has undergone a significant transformation in its approach to eDiscovery. With the deprecation of the eDiscovery (Standard) and eDiscovery (Premium) models, Microsoft is rolling out what it calls a "Unified Experience" that promises a streamlined and integrated way to manage compliance and legal investigations. This new model consolidates functionality into a single, intuitive interface and is expected to provide integrated case creation and management, advanced search and filtering capabilities, enhanced reporting and auditing, and direct integration with Microsoft Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
These updates are meant to simplify eDiscovery processes, particularly for legal and compliance teams managing increasingly complex data estates across Microsoft 365 environments. Microsoft's guidance suggests this new approach should reduce fragmentation, lower management overhead, and increase investigation efficiency. By bringing together previously separate tools under one roof, the unified experience theoretically enables more seamless legal workflows with less need for switching between different environments.
However, while the unified interface addresses some previous usability pain points, it won’t eliminate many of the Core Challenges that legal and IT teams face. In some ways, it introduces new complexities that are harder to navigate precisely because of the assumption that things are now “solved.”
One of the most significant pain points remains export functionality. Legal teams often need to perform large-scale exports as part of litigation or regulatory responses. However, Purview's export thresholds introduce severe limitations. When content volumes exceed Microsoft's set limits, teams are forced to break up exports, manually creating inefficiencies, increasing error potential, and undermining defensibility.
This is not just a logistical concern; it directly affects the timeline and reliability of Legal Holds and productions. Fragmented exports raise the risk of data inconsistency and make it more difficult to maintain audit trails that are essential for legal defensibility. Despite improvements in UI, the core limitations of handling large volumes of data remain. The platform still doesn’t provide the granularity or flexibility many teams require in high-stakes legal scenarios. These bottlenecks are especially problematic when legal teams face tight deadlines or need to process large quantities of data from across multiple Microsoft 365 services.
Another area of growing concern is licensing. As Microsoft evolves Purview, some key eDiscovery features are increasingly tied to E5 licenses. For example, review set filtering and tagging, legal hold notifications and reminders, review set analytics, and integration with Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit are features that E3 customers cannot access.
For E3 customers, these missing capabilities mean they’re left with a partial solution that lacks critical functionality. This divide introduces strategic risk for legal teams operating under the assumption that the unified experience brings parity across license tiers. In reality, E3 users face a fractured experience that hampers the efficiency and overall scope of legal discovery. The widening functionality gap leaves legal teams in a difficult position: they must either push for an expensive license upgrade or struggle to manage discovery tasks with inadequate tools.
This licensing gap complicates the budgeting process and introduces new governance challenges. Organizations that initially chose E3, believing it offered a robust compliance suite, are now realizing that essential eDiscovery features are gated behind a more expensive license tier. As a result, legal operations risk becoming less agile, and compliance teams may struggle to justify their technology stack.
The move to a unified experience also introduces a new learning curve. Legal and IT teams will need to restructure their workflows, retrain staff, and revise internal processes, all while managing cases. Although Microsoft's documentation is improving, it does little to address the realities of cross-functional coordination, export compliance, or legal defensibility that teams face daily.
There is also the issue of legacy knowledge. Teams familiar with the older Standard and Premium models need to unlearn old practices and adapt to new ones, an effort that drains time and resources. In organizations with high turnover or limited training bandwidth, this adjustment period can severely impact eDiscovery readiness. For firms dealing with active litigation or regulatory requests, any delays or missteps can have costly legal consequences.
The challenge here is not merely about user interface redesign. It’s about the structural assumptions that underline Microsoft’s approach to eDiscovery, assumptions that often don’t align with how legal teams operate. By centralizing everything under a “unified” banner, Microsoft risks oversimplifying the nuanced needs of legal workflows, where customization, speed, and auditability are paramount.
For organizations that find themselves constrained by the Limitations of Purview, whether due to licensing gaps, export limitations, or workflow complexities, Expireon offers a compelling alternative. It picks up where Microsoft’s unified experience leaves off, providing a platform that enhances and extends the capabilities of Microsoft 365 in ways that matter most to legal and IT stakeholders.
Expireon eliminates the bottleneck of export thresholds by enabling high-volume export automation. Legal teams no longer need to waste hours managing fragmented exports or worrying about the compliance risks associated with partial data sets. This alone can dramatically improve the speed and accuracy of eDiscovery operations, especially during time-sensitive investigations.
Expireon also supports advanced search and filtering across both Microsoft 365 and legacy data sources. This ensures a comprehensive view of the organization's data, which is increasingly important as organizations continue to migrate content from legacy systems while still needing access for legal and compliance purposes. The ability to search seamlessly across all data repositories significantly reduces the risk of missing critical evidence or producing incomplete responses to legal inquiries.
Perhaps most importantly, Expireon bridges the gap between E3 and E5 functionality. Instead of forcing organizations into costly licensing upgrades, Expireon delivers flexible legal hold capabilities, customizable review workflows, and audit-ready compliance processes that meet the needs of even the most demanding legal teams. These features empower legal departments to take full control of their discovery strategy without being tied to Microsoft's licensing roadmap.
Expireon is built with the understanding that eDiscovery isn’t just a feature; it’s a critical function that underpins corporate risk management. By focusing on defensibility, scalability, and efficiency, Expireon empowers organizations to move beyond the constraints of Microsoft Purview’s built-in limitations and embrace a more agile and reliable approach to legal and compliance operations.
The unified experience in Microsoft Purview is a step in the right direction, but it’s far from a final destination. Legal and IT teams still face real, practical limitations that can hinder their ability to respond quickly and defensibly to legal demands. For those looking to close the gap, Expireon represents a proven path forward. As organizations reevaluate their compliance strategies in the face of evolving tools and licensing models, it’s clear that achieving true eDiscovery readiness will require more than just a UI upgrade. It will require a complete, adaptable solution that supports legal teams where Microsoft Purview still falls short.