During its Ignite event at the beginning of October, Microsoft made several announcements regarding new features SharePoint and OneDrive users could expect over the next few months. A few of these additions have already begun to appear and more should be on the way by the end of 2018.
Microsoft has said SharePoint admins and users will find ‘Unified Labels’ are ready for use by the end of October. This means the Microsoft Security and Compliance Centre portal now offers more consistency in how it creates labels to protect and retain information in software such as Office 365.
Senior marketing manager Bill Baer stated on Microsoft’s website:
“Unified labels provide a single location to create and configure data sensitivity labels for both Azure Information Protection and Office 365, so you can set up protection and retention labels and policies in the same place.”
To help manage these labels and see how and where they are being used in an organisation, a Label Analytics tool should start rolling out by the end of the year.
Also arriving later in 2018 will be ‘file plans’ to augment existing governance labels in Office 365. This will give a hierarchical structure for managing data retention labels that include identifiers, such as statutory references, categories and departmental needs. File plans can be easily edited in Excel and imported back into Office 365 as required.
If data assets do somehow go missing, Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams offers a complete self-service recovery tool. Site administrators will be able to rewind changes made over the past 30 days and restore document libraries of shared files from groups in Yammer, Outlook, Office 365, Teams and SharePoint. This feature is set to be previewed under the company’s Targeted Release program by December 2018.
Companies with workplaces in multiple countries will benefit from multi-geo capabilities that allow a single Office 365 tenant to span across multiple regions. This means data will be able to be migrated to various on-premises silos while at the same time complying with data residency regulations.
To make external sharing easier to manage, Microsoft has integrated its one-time passcode sign-in tool into the Azure AD B2B platform. External users can be listed in an Azure AD directory and managed in a familiar way while also allowing SharePoint sites and lists to be shared outside of an organisation.
These updates will come on top of other changes announced at Ignite including simplified hub site creation and management to streamlines the set-up for users in multiple time zones and with different language preferences.
Microsoft is also encouraging SharePoint admins to make use of its revamped console by including the option to make it the default setting. The company says the classic admin centre can be reverted to if needed, but is hoping users will give feedback on the changes so it can be further tailored in future.
For more information about how Microsoft SharePoint can streamline your company’s use of data, get in touch with us at WM Reply .