Microsoft acquired a company called Equivio which was a machine learning service for e-Discovery and compliance. Microsoft is now rolling this new service into their E5 Plan under the label of Advanced eDiscovery.
eDiscovery involves finding files, documents and content related to particular legal matter. The existing eDiscovery features in Office 365 allow you to define terms for searching for content related to a legal matter and to cordone off these documents so that they are available for a legal proceeding.
The new “Advanced” e-Discovery features provide better searching for these documents and records through the following features:
- Predictive machine learning matching of documents by taking small collections of documents as a “training set” and tagging them as relevant or non-relevant. Office365 then uses these training sets to better match future documents.
- Fuzzy duplicate detection provides the ability to find documents that are similar to other documents.
- Email threading organizes emails into conversations to make it easier to read through thousands of found emails.
- Themes allow you to tag content based on different topics.
These new features are only available in the E5 Office 365 plan.