Microsoft recently implemented “Adaptive” retention policies. At step 2 of “Create retention policy” you’ll be asked “Choose the type of retention policy to create”: “A policy can be adaptive or static. Advantage of an adaptive policy will automatically update where it’s applied based on attributes or properties you’ll define. A static policy is applied to content in a fixed set of locations and must be manually updated if those locations change.”

And if you selected “Adaptive” – on the next step you will need to provide the adaptive scope (so at this moment you should already have created your adaptive scopes):

So, let us create your adaptive scopes.
What type of scope do you want to create? SharePoint sites…

And then you’ll have nothing more then set of conditions:

where you can use objects: “Site Url”, “Site Name” and “Refinable String 0″..”Refinable String 99”. Conditions would be “is equal to”, “is not equal to”, “starts with” and “not starts with”. Or you can select “Advanced query builder” and enter KQL query.

Advanced query builder

Advanced query builder allows us to use more site properties then “Site Url”, “Site Name” and “Refinable Strings” and more conditions than “is (not) equal to” and “(not) starts with”.

E.g. we can use “Created” property and “<“, “>”, “<=”, “>=” conditions:

What is the takeaway from this for SharePoint administrators? We would be asked to configure SharePoint the way compliance/retention people can use Refinable Strings.