Email and calendar
Exchange Online carries federal correspondence, and most agency decisions still start and end in email, which makes the inbox one of the largest sources of federal records.
Records in Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365, all the way to NARA.
Federal agencies have standardized on Microsoft 365, and that's where most federal records are now born. Feith RMA iQ makes those records meet NARA's requirements — cross-system capture, case-file logic, multi-stage disposition, and the federal transfer obligation — while your teams keep working in M365.
6 / 6 NARA UERM categoriesFeith closes all six under one file plan
4 M365 surfaces, capturedExchange · SharePoint · Teams · OneDrive
0 Disruption to usersYour teams keep working in M365; Feith carries the records obligation
IL7 Ceiling of Feith's federal ATOs30+ ATOs up to TS/SCI; FedRAMP Moderate, Feith-hosted on Azure Government
Where the work happens
Microsoft 365 is an exceptional collaboration platform.
Email, documents, chat, and files in one place: it's where federal teams do the work, and where most federal records are now born. Feith adds the recordkeeping layer on top.
Documents and sites
SharePoint Online holds the documents, libraries, and sites teams build their work on. It's where a draft becomes the official version.
Chat and meetings
Teams carries the day-to-day: the messages, channels, and meetings where decisions actually get made, and increasingly where they're recorded.
Files and search
OneDrive keeps individual work, and M365 search makes it findable across the tenant. Fast, familiar, and everywhere agencies already work.
That's exactly why records management has to be deliberate here: M365 is where the records are, but capturing them into a federal file plan, classifying them, gating disposition through approval, and transferring them to NARA is a different job from collaboration. That's the layer Feith adds. How Feith captures from M365
Where the baseline stops
Six places M365 stops short of full NARA UERM.
NARA's Universal Electronic Records Management requirements define six functional categories. M365 covers part of each; full NARA compliance takes the capability it leaves out. Those gaps show up once agencies move past routine content into mission records, cross-system capture, and the federal transfer obligation.
Capture
What M365 covers
M365-native surfaces only.
What full UERM requires: Feith delivers
Records also live in ServiceNow, Salesforce, case systems, legacy DMS, SMS, social media, and paper. Those land outside M365's retention scope, so Feith captures them into one file plan.
Maintain & use
What M365 covers
One retention label per item, applied flat.
What full UERM requires: Feith delivers
Mission and case records need layered classification: a case file with sub-categories, each carrying its own retention, all contingent on closure and approval.
Disposal
What M365 covers
Retention-triggered deletion, with staged disposition review.
What full UERM requires: Feith delivers
Approvals gated on business and case events, holds that span sources outside M365, and workflow-driven sign-off that crosses systems.
Transfer
What M365 covers
Manual export workflows.
What full UERM requires: Feith delivers
NARA transfer requires a complete transfer package: SF-258 metadata, record-series mapping, accession bundles, a manifest, and hash digests.
Metadata
What M365 covers
Per-workload schema that varies across Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams.
What full UERM requires: Feith delivers
The NARA-required metadata fields present, normalized, and durable on every captured record, with room for agency extensions.
Reporting
What M365 covers
Posture dashboards and per-policy summaries.
What full UERM requires: Feith delivers
Records officers need disposition-readiness reports, transfer manifests, schedule-coverage maps, and audit-ready evidence packages for inspectors general.
M365 plus Feith closes all six.
Your teams keep working in SharePoint, Exchange, and Teams. The compliance layer that makes the records defensible lives in Feith — the six capabilities below.
The augmentation layer
RMA iQ closes every gap, without disrupting how your people work.
RMA iQ runs alongside M365 and extends it into full UERM compliance. Three lead capabilities close the highest-stakes gaps; six more fill in the rest of the surface.
Accession and transfer to NARA
Produces the NARA transfer package and manages the transfer manifest end to end. This is the accession work Feith takes on.
Multi-stage disposition approval
Records officer, agency counsel, and program office sign off independently before any destruction or transfer, routed through the Feith workflow engine. Holds persist until every stakeholder signs.
Classification, markings, and CUI for classified workloads
Banner enforcement, portion marking, and CUI tagging with downgrade and declassification logic — the controls that carry a records program into classified environments.
Multi-pick NARA classification
A record can hold several classifications and category memberships, each with its own retention. The longest applicable retention prevails.
Multi-stage retention triggers
Time- and event-based triggers chain: active → inactive on a date → eligible on case closure → through approval to final disposition.
NARA metadata normalization
The NARA-required metadata fields are captured at intake across every connected source, normalized to UTC, and held in a durable schema independent of M365's per-workload variations.
File-plan inheritance across surfaces
One agency-level file plan governs records inside M365 and outside it. Schedules are defined once and applied through category rules rather than duplicated per office.
Event-based disposition
Records move on real business events (case closed, contract expired, FOIA resolved) captured from the systems where those events happen.
Declassification, FOIA/PA, interagency tasking
Workflow-driven modules for classified review, FOIA case management, and cross-agency tasking, each integrating back into the file plan.
RMA iQ is built to DoDM 8180.01, JITC-tested under the legacy DoD 5015.02-STD. Access control is ABAC and RBAC, evaluated per request, so sensitive and classified records are confined to authorized identities by policy, not by folder convention.
The engine behind these capabilities: see RMA iQ
Worked examples
Two places agencies feel the gap first.
The gap analysis is abstract until you watch it play out on a real record. The first example is a mission record traveling as a case. The second is one agency's disposition schedule trying to govern dozens of offices.
1 · A case file, two architectures
Microsoft 365 aloneFlat labeling
MemoCorrespondence
Subject interviewCorrespondence
Interview transcriptCorrespondence
SubpoenaCorrespondence
Disposition memoCorrespondence
Closing reportCorrespondence
Retention7 years from creation
ScopePer record · no case grouping
HoldQuery-scoped eDiscovery
Each record carries one label. No case grouping. Disposition runs per record on the label's schedule, independent of case state.
M365 + Feith RMA iQLayered · case-aware
Case file · Investigation-074
CategoryInvestigation
Sub-categorySubject file
SensitivityCUI//PRVCY
Hold statePending closure
MemoSubject interviewInterview transcriptSubpoenaDisposition memoClosing report
Disposition chain · 4 gates
1Records intakeReview
2Records officerDisposition memo
3Agency counselLegal hold cleared
4Transfer or disposalNARA package or destroy
Records inherit case context and multi-pick classification. Disposition is gated on case closure plus multi-stage approval: nothing is destroyed until each office has independently signed off.
None of this touched the working files your teams use every day: the case context, classification, and approval gates all live in Feith.
2 · One schedule, applied everywhere
The General Records Schedule covers administrative records common across agencies — financial, personnel, IT, facilities. Mission records need agency-specific authority. Managing the one-to-many relationship between record series and the offices that use them produces a known burden inside M365: a duplicate series per office, and schedule drift over time. Feith collapses it into one agency-level schedule, defined once and applied through category rules rather than duplicated per office.
Agency-wide disposition schedule GRS + agency-specific authorities
one schedule, applied to every division ↓
Mission Operations
Field Investigations
Regulatory Affairs
…and to the branches and offices beneath them — defined once, no duplicate schedules ↓
Policy Office
Region IV Field Office
Subject Files Office
Rule Drafting Office
Enforcement Region V
Citizen Inquiries Office
Physical and electronic records share the same schedule. Records inside and outside M365 share the same schedule. The GRS and agency-specific authorities are combined and applied uniformly.
Co-located deployment
Feith deploys in Microsoft Azure, alongside your M365.
Deployed in Microsoft Azure, the augmentation layer runs alongside your M365 tenant. For government workloads, capture runs government cloud to government cloud — never transiting commercial infrastructure.
Microsoft Azure · commercial or government region
Microsoft 365M365 tenant
Exchange OnlineSharePoint OnlineTeamsOneDrivePurview
Capture · Microsoft Graph
Augmentation layerFeith RMA iQ
Capture servicesRecords engineWorkflow enginePrompt RunnerABAC policy engineNARA transfer packaging
ABAC decisions per-request evaluation
Agency-ownedIdentity & monitoring
Entra IDSentinelYour SIEMAgency PKI
All ↔ monitoringAudit telemetry streamed to Sentinel / SIEM · single retention store
Government workloads: capture runs government cloud to government cloud
One control plane
User management, access policy, and monitoring run through a single identity provider and one telemetry pipeline.
Government cloud, end to end
For government workloads, capture from M365 to Feith runs government cloud to government cloud — never transiting commercial infrastructure. Administrative surface area collapses.
Commercial or Government
Feith's FedRAMP Moderate environment runs on Azure Government; DoD Impact Level deployments run in the agency's own government cloud, up to IL7. Air-gapped and on-premises deployments remain available.
Engine and deployment details: see RMA iQ
How we get there
A repeatable path from baseline M365 to full UERM.
An engagement extends the M365 baseline rather than replacing it: assess the tenant and the schedules that govern it, connect the four surfaces, keep capture visible, and retire legacy stores once their records are safe in the file plan.
Assess
Inventory the tenant and the records-bearing systems around it, and map current retention coverage against the agency's schedules.
Connect
Bring Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive under the file plan, then extend capture to sources outside M365.
Monitor
Keep capture coverage and schedule health visible, and audit for drift as content and policy change.
Retire
Sunset legacy stores once their records are captured into the durable file plan.
Engage
Build the M365 records architecture that holds up to a NARA inspection.
Talk to a federal records engineer about your M365 deployment, your UERM gap, and the specific RMA iQ configuration that closes it. The conversation starts with your current schedule, your current sources, and where the work hurts.
Available through
GSA MAS · Direct procurement
Azure Commercial · Azure Government (FedRAMP Moderate) · On-prem with M365 capture
We'll be in touch shortly.
We'll come in with questions about your current schedule, your current source systems, and where the gaps land first. Look for an email from a real person on the records team.
This page complements Integrations & Capture (M365 connector anatomy) and RMA iQ (records engine and deployment).