ShareGate makes your biggest Microsoft 365 admin jobs easy. Explore ten ways you can simplify your everyday Teams and SharePoint operations in one multi-tool.
As an IT pro, your challenge of managing, supporting, and keeping track of everything in your environment is a tale as old as time (well, as old as the advent of digital technology requiring IT pros).
The challenge is, perhaps, even greater when it comes to managing a Microsoft 365 environment – the incredible ecosystem of integrated apps, tools, and services that make up Microsoft 365 makes it powerful, but also difficult to manage.
Microsoft 365 is constantly changing with the times, but with it comes the need to keep up with new releases and the impacts they may have on your environment while managing a complex platform on an ongoing basis.
This is where a Microsoft 365 management solution like ShareGate comes to the rescue.
Use ShareGate to simplify your day-to-day:
- Manage your Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups
- Copy content and power through change management
- Manage and audit SharePoint permissions
- Manipulate your metadata in bulk
- Build your governance policy
- Monitor your SharePoint and Teams
- Drive faster adoption and get the most out of Microsoft 365
- Streamline the best user experience
- Turn a site into a site collection
- Enable support, reduce helpdesk tickets
We’re well-known for our simple migration tool…
…but we also equip you with the tools to manage your Teams and SharePoint environments, allowing you to actively anticipate your organization’s needs.
- Manage your content
- Understand your inventory
- Clean up and govern your tenant
- Control permissions
- Guide users to use the right tools
ShareGate simplifies every task – whether mundane, high-stakes or anything in between.
To use ShareGate’s features to their full potential, you need to understand their wide-ranging functionalities. Let’s take a look!
1. Manage your Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups
The very first step to managing your environment optimally is being able to see everything inside it.
ShareGate gives you a centralized overview of your Teams environment. You can see everything going on with the teams your end users created, and this allows you to manage Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups better.
It sounds simple because it is. ShareGate doesn’t overcomplicate things. Quite the opposite: simplicity is key to maintaining an organized and secure environment.
2. Copy content and power through change management
As an IT pro, you know more than anyone how organizational changes can be complicated and involve various important components, big and small. Managing change effectively without the proper tools is difficult.
Agility is key. Whether you’re supporting users during a migration or reorganizing content to better align with an organizational change by splitting or merging sites, there’s so much to manage behind the scenes.
We understand this, which is why we offer tools to support change management in your organization, including SharePoint content management capabilities and the ability to copy content seamlessly.
3. Manage and audit SharePoint permissions
Managing SharePoint permissions may be an everyday task for IT teams, but that doesn’t make it any less important – it’s crucial to your organization’s security.
Permissions not only need to be managed but also audited regularly to maintain an ongoing standard of high-level security for your organization’s data.
ShareGate offers a built-in Permissions Matrix Report, which covers all those bases. Think of it as your personal security assistant, an all-knowing and affordable assistant. With one click, you get comprehensive visibility of what users and groups have access to and their permission levels, in your SharePoint and Microsoft 365 environments.
4. Manipulate your metadata in bulk
No one likes tedious and repetitive tasks. Unfortunately, that’s often a big part of the job for IT teams. With ShareGate, no more.
With Bulk Edit Content, you can quickly add metadata columns and content to classify your data better. You can map users and content types. And you can export your metadata to Excel and use the power of Excel to create transformation formulas or simply add columns to import back to ShareGate.
5. Build your governance policy
Developing governance policies to fit your organization’s needs can be challenging. The very first step is knowing exactly what your organization’s needs are, which is why reporting on Microsoft 365 usage is extremely valuable.
With ShareGate’s wide-ranging reporting tools, you can analyze usage results to assess your needs. Then create your policies!
Start with customizable sensitivity tags that control each team’s privacy status, external sharing settings, and guest access permissions.
With your policies created, you’ve set the guardrails for owners to follow as you collaborate to fill the gaps in information with the ShareGate Teams chatbot (or email!).
6. Monitor your SharePoint and Teams
Once you’ve built your policies, you’ve set a solid foundation – and now there’s ongoing work to be done. Monitoring is an important continual task to assess and establish progress, act on membership needs, and ensure your environment is secure and organized.
ShareGate allows you to monitor the progress of your policies through dashboards. Take it a step further by scheduling progress reports to be sent to upper management.
You can also monitor your Teams and SharePoint environments to assess and take action on team membership needs, such as orphaned teams. Monitoring also ensures that you’re able to keep your environment clean and tidy by catching unused sites, checked-out documents, and inactive teams.
Better yet, let ShareGate do the monitoring for you! Set up your Inactivity detection policy so ShareGate can keep an eye out for inactive teams and groups.
7. Drive faster adoption and get the most out of Microsoft 365
Agility is important for IT professionals, not only because tech advancements lead to new tools and updates, but also because organizational changes are a fact of life. This has a big impact on IT teams.
When change is inevitable, the best thing to do is find a way to make it as painless as possible. This means using tools that do the heavy lifting for you so that you save time.
ShareGate helps you keep up with organizational changes with an intuitive SharePoint content management system. Move or split content, copy permissions from one environment to another, and split or merge teams with a few clicks. Keep your organization productive by collaborating in the right space, with the right content and the right people.
8. Streamline the best user experience
People are always moving around within an organization, and without the right tools to manage this, it can be a headache for your IT team to manage (and equally frustrating for the users).
Whether a new employee was hired, someone is leaving, permissions need to be altered, or access needs to be granted (or revoked), the ease of the process for the IT team dictates the user’s experience.
ShareGate’s SharePoint content management system offers a streamlined approach for any user changes. Onboarding or offboarding is a piece of cake. Permissions can be changed, copied, updated or removed easily, depending on the situation. There are also various options in terms of granting or revoking access, from transferring team/group ownership, to changing content access rights as needed.
9. Turn a site into a site collection
Every IT admin will need to turn a site into a site collection at some point, and there are a few common triggers to keep in mind:
- Following a business re-organization
- Promoting a site to a group-connected SharePoint site collection (Microsoft 365 group)
- When adapting to the modern SharePoint experience – taking your site structure from top-down (sites and subsites) to flat (no subsites)
Whether you’re moving from one SharePoint environment to another, or simply cleaning house, you’ll need to promote, demote or merge sites as part of that process.
ShareGate helps you reorganize the hierarchy of your sites. Modernize your SharePoint online architecture by promoting subsites to top-level sites in a few clicks to enable modern workloads like Microsoft Teams.
10. Enable support, reduce helpdesk tickets
How can you offer optimal support to your end users? The core solution starts before the support requests even come in: maintaining a clean and organized environment. A tidy environment allows you (or your users) to find relevant and helpful content faster when you need to troubleshoot a problem.
An efficient content management system is crucial when it comes to actionable inquiries.
Move requests are common in both SharePoint and Teams, and this is easy to resolve with the help of ShareGate’s Copy Content. You can also adjust permissions on the fly. Plus, detailed reports allow you to find and action issues such as orphaned teams and checked-out documents.
Or, take it one step further by editing team and group membership so the right people are in charge. Owners can collaborate on key issues like external sharing and security, giving you a little more time in your day-to-day.
In case you need help convincing your organization of the value that ShareGate would bring to your everyday work and the business as a whole, you now have ten solid arguments in your favor. 👍
Yes, our SharePoint migration capabilities are second to none (we say this somewhat humbly), but don’t let that define us.
Even if you don’t see migration in the future, we offer an optimized solution when it comes to any changes made within your SharePoint and Teams environment. And we know the changes you’re dealing with on a regular basis are substantial, to say the least.
Get the full ShareGate experience when you take it for a spin with a free trial!
