Netwoven’s Office 365 Governance product team was busy at work in Q4 2017 and has some exciting news to share! We are constantly interacting with and listening to our customers, our contacts at Microsoft as well as keeping our ears to the street about where we can improve and add value. In January 2018, we have released several major upgrades that the team is pumped about! These upgrades include:
- A slick new user interface
- Provisioning support for Microsoft Teams
- Content inventory jobs and reports
- Smart disposition rules
Let’s dive into a bit more detail about each of these new additions…
The New User Interface
Unfortunately, cloud applications age much faster than we do! After more than a whopping 18 months of life, we recognized that it was already time for face-lift. The team was driven by the key design mantra of “Simple and Sleek” and has delivered:
The new user interface offers all the functionality we had previously and more, however it uses the page real estate more efficiently, loads more quickly and keeps the design simple and sleek.
Provisioning Support from Microsoft Teams
We already supported frictionless but controlled provisioning of SharePoint Site Collections, SharePoint Sites, Office 365 Groups and Yammer Groups. Now, we have added Microsoft Teams into our provisioning repertoire. Previously this required manual intervention due to a lack of APIs, however we have implemented a new approach that supports frictionless creation of Microsoft Teams for your end users!
Content Inventory
Office 365 Content & Collaboration Service Owners are responsible for the maintenance of their Office 365 environment as a well-oiled machine. This requires a clear and comprehensive understanding of what exists in the environment. Unfortunately, Office 365 doesn’t offer a comprehensive OOTB interface or tooling to help understand your corpus of containers and content and service owners are needing to build custom scripts, visualizations and processes to create a consolidated view. We have built functionality into the Office 365 Governance Application to help support this need.
We now support automatic generation of content inventory reports that include SharePoint Site Collections, SharePoint Sites, Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams. We save your data into your Office 365 tenant and refresh it daily so that you have updated insights to help you understand and manage your environment.
We intend to continue adding more information to be captured in these reports and are more than open to your input on what would be useful!
Smart Disposition Rules
When it comes to maintaining a clean environment. Step 1 is to understand your content inventory and refine which content is relevant and which isn’t. Step 2 is to act on keeping your environment clean. Unfortunately, Office 365 again doesn’t offer a comprehensive OOTB interface or tooling to manage dispositioning of all your Office 365 containers. We have Information Management Policies for SharePoint Sites and Office 365 Group Dispositioning in Azure, however these tools are disjointed and offer very limited capabilities for both triggering a rule and taking action. Hence the introduction of Office 365 Governance Application’s Smart Dispositioning Rules.
The new Disposition Rules functionality allows for the triggering of a rule based on any of the collected content inventory data. As the collected content inventory fields expand, so will the capabilities here to trigger a rule. We will soon also support all provisioning form fields as disposition rule criteria as well. You simply use the intuitive interface for creating a rule to indicate your rule criteria.
Next, all the Office 365 containers that meet the specified rule criteria can then have an action taken on them for dispositioning. Currently, we support the following actions:
- Read-Only
- Lock
- Delete
- Permanently Delete (skip recycle bin)
- Email results
- Save results to SharePoint
The great thing about the last option is that it opens a world of options. We can use Flow, Nintex, SharePoint Designer, Remote Event Receivers, Web Hooks or any number of other options to read the rule output data that is saved to SharePoint and then take any number of custom actions. This is an area that we are currently focusing efforts to expand upon.
What’s Next?
That’s it for the January updates… Thanks for tuning in! We have some more exciting updates coming in the month of February that will include the following:
- Provisioning support for Communications Sites
- Templated Power BI content inventory reports to visualize the data we create for you
- Additional trigger criteria and actions for disposition rules to make them smarter
- And more!
Until next time!
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