Better Together: Microsoft and AvePoint for In-Place Archiving with Enterprise-Grade Intelligence and Governance

At the recent Microsoft 365 Community Conference, we announced our partnership with Microsoft to support native file-level archiving, a new capability that continues to evolve how organizations manage content in Microsoft 365.

Rising storage costs and unmanaged inactive content are increasing spend and slowing organizations down, often forcing users to delete or export content to reduce spend. Industry research reinforces the scale of the problem: More than half of organizations cite cloud and SaaS data sprawl as a top challenge, making it harder to control storage growth without a structured approach. With Microsoft’s file-level archiving, IT teams now have a native way to control storage growth while preserving links, workflows, and familiar access patterns. AvePoint’s Information Management solution builds on this foundation with the intelligence to identify archiving candidates, governance to enforce policies, and automation required to scale archiving safely.

What Is Microsoft File‑Level Archiving?

Microsoft’s file‑level archiving allows organizations to move individual SharePoint and OneDrive files into non‑active archive storage. Microsoft 365 Archive introduces in‑place, file‑level archiving, allowing you to archive individual files directly within SharePoint and OneDrive, without disrupting how your teams work today.  

Your content stays in place, remains searchable, and continues to meet Microsoft’s security and compliance standards, while shifting to a lower‑cost storage tier designed for inactive data. The result is a simpler way to control storage growth, reduce costs, and keep inactive content accessible when you need it — without sacrificing visibility, protection, or compliance.

But how can organizations decide which files should be archived, when archiving is appropriate, and how to apply these decisions consistently across the organization? 

Where AvePoint Comes In

AvePoint helps you scale archiving into a governed information management strategy by providing an intelligence and rules engine on top of Microsoft’s archive storage. This includes:

1. Visibility Before Action 

Determining what exactly should be archived can be ambiguous. AvePoint provides the visibility to confidently identify the right candidates for archiving before any action is taken. Discovery and Analysis helps organizations identify redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data and candidates for archiving before action is taken. This ensures archiving decisions are intentional, not reactive. Instead of asking end users to guess what should be archived for every file, we enable decision making based on your definition of what is inactive, redundant, obsolete, or trivial. You can also analyze and archive content that has been identified as duplicates.  

2. Policy‑Driven Automation 

With AvePoint, you can apply centralized rules, repeatable lifecycle actions, and governance that scales across the organization, creating consistency without disrupting end users, and ensuring archiving aligns with business, compliance, and retention goals.

3. Restore, Recentering, and Stubbing

While Microsoft provides the native archive tier, AvePoint Opus orchestrates what happens before and after files are archived, ensuring content remains usable, recoverable, and managed over time. Through intelligent stubbing, users retain seamless access to archived files in their original locations, while IT maintains visibility and governance. Built‑in restore workflows allow content to be retrieved on demand, and advanced recentering capabilities ensure files can be restored to new or appropriate locations when sites, libraries, or business contexts change. Together, AvePoint enables organizations to archive with confidence while minimizing disruption to workflows.  

4.  Governance Guardrails and Information Lifecycle Management

Through integrating with AvePoint, file‑level archiving can become a step towards a broader data minimization and governance strategy. Information lifecycle management enables organizations to manage data continuously, helping them preserve what has ongoing value, defensibly delete what does not, and reduce clutter and oversharing risk while improving content relevance and findability. The result is controlled, compliant content management across the full information lifecycle, from creation and use through archiving and retirement. 

Better Together: Control Storage Growth without Compromise

When combined, Microsoft file‑level archiving and AvePoint help organizations move from storage management to information management. Microsoft provides the native archive storage and compliance foundation, while AvePoint delivers the intelligence, visibility, and governance needed to use it effectively.

Together, they enable organizations to control storage growth with confidence, reduce rot instead of relocating it, apply governance without slowing collaboration, and treat archiving as a strategic lifecycle decision.