Product update: January 2021

Looking for what’s new and what’s changed in your ShareGate apps? You’ve come to the right place! Here’s your January 2021 update.

Welcome to ChangeLog, a new monthly blog series where members of the ShareGate Product Marketing team recap recent updates and changes to ShareGate Desktop, ShareGate Apricot, and ShareGate Overcast to help you get the most out of your ShareGate software.

In this edition, you’ll find details on new shortcuts in ShareGate Apricot to help save you time, the integration of Azure Advisor savings recommendations in ShareGate Overcast, and the launch of weekly “Ask the Expert” drop-in sessions with our Customer Success team.

In Case You Missed It (ICYMI), you can also get caught up on our recent ShareGate Desktop release—which enables you to move channels from one team to another in Microsoft Teams—along with some other notable improvements and bug fixes for January. And finally, get a taste for what’s coming up next on the product roadmap.

Ready? Let’s jump in!

Table of contents

What’s new:

New shortcuts to save you time in ShareGate Apricot
Azure Advisor savings recommendations now in ShareGate Overcast
“Ask the Expert” weekly drop-in sessions

Get more from the same ShareGate subscription

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What’s new

In the month of January, we introduced some brand-new features and product updates to make your experience even better when using ShareGate’s tools.

This time around, you’ll find new shortcuts in ShareGate Apricot, the integration of Azure Advisor savings recommendations in ShareGate Overcast, and the launch of weekly “Ask the Expert” drop-in sessions with our Customer Success team.

New shortcuts to save you time in ShareGate Apricot

This month, we’ve introduced the ability to add an owner to a team directly from the Groups page—so you don’t have to go into each team’s detail page to take action.

Simply filter your teams and Microsoft 365 groups to find the ones that don’t have owners, and quickly add one by choosing from our list of suggested owners.

GIF of cursor assigning a new owner to an ownerless team.

We’ve also introduced new filters on the Groups page to help you find teams and groups that don’t have an assigned purpose or group sensitivity label—so you can quickly identify them and update them in bulk.

GIF of cursor adding a sensitivity label to a team.

Azure Advisor savings recommendations now in ShareGate Overcast

We’ve started pulling the Azure Advisor cost recommendations from your Azure portal right into ShareGate Overcast. That way, you can see all of your cost savings in one place.

Now, ShareGate Overcast’s exclusive Premium recommendations and your Azure Advisor recommendations can both be viewed in your Optimize tab. We’ve also reorganized all recommendations by resource type so that it’s easier for you to sort through and identify savings opportunities.

“Ask the Expert” weekly drop-in sessions

Our Customer Success team is now hosting live “Ask the Expert” sessions to share their best practices with you, go over more complex use cases, and answer your most burning questions. It’s also a great opportunity to share your experience with your peers (and maybe learn a thing or two from them as well!).

Sessions will take place twice weekly. Join our Tuesday sessions if you’re a new customer looking for help with getting started. Or, join our Thursday sessions if you’re a longtime ShareGate client looking for help with a particular scenario or looking to learn more about new features and capabilities.

Watch out for an invitation from the Customer Success team in your mailbox!

In Case You Missed It (ICYMI)

Ensure users have everything they need to succeed in Microsoft Teams.

Learn more

Missed a recent product release announcement? Want to get up to speed on the latest improvements and bug fixes in-app? You’ve come to the right place!

In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap of our latest ShareGate Desktop release along with other notable changes and improvements from the month of January.

ShareGate Desktop 14.0: Microsoft Teams channel migrations

With all of the craziness of the end of the year, you might have missed our latest ShareGate Desktop release that enables you to move channels from one team to another in Microsoft Teams. We’ve also introduced extra options to customize your Teams migration, so you can move exactly what you want, exactly where you need it.

Whether you’re moving a whole Teams environment to another tenant after a merger or acquisition, or you need to bring over just a few channels to another team to help people collaborate better, our Teams migration tool can help you get there in a few clicks. With this release, you can pick exactly what you want to copy, rename channels pre-migration to avoid errors, copy channels into a brand-new or existing team, and bring along new Teams objects like wiki pages and OneNotes.

Other changes and improvements

Here are some other notable improvements and bug fixes for January. Check out the release notes in our ShareGate support documentation for the full list.

ShareGate Desktop:
- [Patch 14.0.3]: You will notice better handling of Microsoft 365 throttling issues; user roles other than Global Admin can now merge site collections without seeing an access error; the app will copy both legacy navigation and modern navigation when copying modern sites; custom script settings will now be migrated when copying site collections. See the full list of improvements in our release notes.
- [Patch 14.0.2]: We fixed a bug that caused the application to fail to start with the Windows error, and we also solved an issue that prevented the app from copying guest members in teams when they existed in the destination. See the release notes.
ShareGate Apricot: To avoid performance issues, the app no longer crawls groups with over 1000 items with unique permissions when performing an external sharing review. Read the release notes.

Coming soon

We’re always hard at work on new features and improvements based on our users’ needs and requests. Here’s what’s coming up next on the product roadmap:

Incremental Teams migrations in ShareGate Desktop

One thing we know is important to you? Incremental migrations. In other words, the ability to only move over what’s changed since your last migration. Our Product team is working hard on this, and you can expect to see this capability in the upcoming months.

Build your own custom governance policies in ShareGate Apricot

Last year, we introduced new capabilities that enable you to understand a team’s purpose and level of sensitivity with the help of our chatbot for Microsoft Teams. We’re now in the process of building new capabilities that will enable you to set custom policies based on that information. For example, you’ll be able to schedule external sharing reviews for owners according to a team’s level of sensitivity. You’ll also be able to define different inactivity thresholds based on a team’s assigned purpose.

Keep, archive, and now… delete teams in ShareGate Apricot

At the moment, it’s only possible to keep or archive teams and Microsoft 365 groups once they’ve hit your inactivity threshold—but many of you also wanted the option to delete them for good. Coming your way in a few weeks!

Product feedback

A quick reminder that if you have an idea on how we could improve our products, we’d love for you to share it with us in our feedback forums. Our Product team is listening!

If you haven't tried our automated governance platform for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups, what are you waiting for? ShareGate Apricot is easy to setup and even easier to manage—no clunky interface, no coding, and no Azure AD premium subscription required.

Guide users towards secure and productive collaboration in Microsoft Teams while keeping a close eye on what's going on—so you can easily course-correct as you scale. Get full visibility across each team’s lifecycle—from creation all the way through to sunset. And make sure the right users have access to the right things by applying custom-fit security settings based on each team's level of sensitivity and scheduling periodic reviews so team owners can validate external sharing links.

If you’re a ShareGate Desktop customer, then we have great news! Your subscription gives you full access to ShareGate Apricot at no extra charge! Activate your ShareGate Apricot account by signing in here. Make sure to have your ShareGate Desktop license key handy—you’ll need it complete your activation.

Make Teams everyone's favorite tool, with governance that scales with you. See for yourself with a free 30-day trial.