Partial Scanning

Partial Scan is Rencore Governance’s modern scanning engine. Instead of waiting until an entire Microsoft 365 environment has been scanned before updating any inventory data, Partial Scan processes your environment in independent, self-contained batches - and synchronises each batch to the inventory the moment it is complete.

This means customers with large environments no longer face long delays before seeing updated governance data. Inventory totals, policy results, and segment outcomes are refreshed progressively throughout the scan, not only at the end.

Partial Scan replaces the older Full, Initial, and Incremental scan types for supported environments. It applies the most efficient collection strategy automatically: if valid delta tokens are available, they are used. Otherwise, a full data collection is performed - all within the same partial scan framework.

How Partial Scan works

• Root Objects and Child Objects - Every piece of data in your Microsoft 365 environment is classified as either a Root Object or a Child Object.

  • **Root Objects ** are the starting points of a data hierarchy. Each Root Object is self-contained - scanning it includes scanning its entire hierarchy of related data. Examples include a SharePoint Site Collection, a Microsoft Teams team, a user, or a Power App environment.
  • **Child Objects ** belong to a Root Object and are always scanned together with it. For example, the members, channels, and SharePoint site of a Teams team are all Child Objects of that team.

• Batch Processing - Rather than scanning all Root Objects at once, Partial Scan divides them into batches. The size of each batch is configurable per entity type (see Batch Configuration below). This allows large environments to be processed incrementally.

  Each batch goes through the following stages:

  1. Scan - Root Objects in the batch, together with all their Child Objects, are scanned in a depth-first manner. The system fully resolves one Root Object at a time before moving to the next.
  2. Partial Finalize - Once all Root Objects in the batch are scanned, the batch data is synchronised into the main inventory. New, updated, and removed objects are detected, and the inventory is updated.
  3. Policy and segment update - Policies, segments, and reports that are affected by the batch are recalculated immediately.
  4. Stats update - Inventory totals are updated, so customers see the latest counts.

• Depth-First Scanning - Within each batch, Rencore uses a depth-first strategy. This means that before moving to the next Root Object, the system fully scans the current Root Object and all of its Child Objects. This ensures that each Root Object’s data is complete before it is synchronised, making the partial finalize step safe and accurate.

After all batches have been processed, a final global finalize step runs. This step identifies Root Objects that were present in the previous scan but were not seen in any batch during the current scan - meaning they have been removed from the environment. Those objects and all their related Child Objects are removed from the inventory.