ShareGate product update: August 2021

Curious what’s changed in your ShareGate apps in the past month? We’ve got you covered with this August 2021 update. 

Welcome to ChangeLog, our monthly series where members of the ShareGate Product Marketing team recap recent updates and changes to ShareGate and ShareGate to help you make the most out of your ShareGate software.

What’s new

This past month, we took ShareGate’s external sharing review feature up a notch by adding guest reviews. This means you and entrusted owners can now review guests in addition to external sharing links. With ShareGate 15.1, you can easily identify groups that have an associated team from the Explorer and when you want to generate reports.

Automatically collaborate with owners to review guest access on a recurrent basis with ShareGate 

This new feature allows you to ask entrusted teams and groups owners to review their guests’ membership. It means that they can easily revoke access for guests that should no longer be in their team or group.

What’s great about this feature is that if you’ve already turned on your external sharing review policy, you don’t need to do anything! It’s automatically included as an additional step for owners to complete when it’s time for their recurrent external sharing review. That way, you can rest assured that only the right people have access to a team and group and its externally shared files.

Love what you’re reading, but not sure what external sharing reviews are? Simply put, it’s a policy that you can automate and customize to ensure that external collaborators (guests) and links to files shared externally have a reason for being in your tenant. Since you don’t necessarily have the knowledge or the full picture of what goes in each team and group, it’s hard to know if you’re successfully keeping the business’ data secure. That’s why you delegate this review to those who know best, owners.

All you have to do is entrust specific teams and groups to their respective owners, set a start date, a recurrence of review, and wait for owners to complete their reviews. Their decisions are effective immediately, no need for you to get involved. By automating the external sharing reviews policy, owners are held accountable for the guests they invite to their teams and groups, as well as the information they decide to share externally.

You can keep track of their actions on the Dashboard and a summary will also be included in your monthly Governance Digest. This way, you can check which owners haven’t yet completed their reviews, and follow up with them, if needed.

It’s important to note that owners of teams and groups that don’t have any guests, or owners of teams and groups that have sensitivity labels that do not allow for guest access, will not be asked to complete guest reviews.

That’s not all! We will be launching more changes pertaining to guest reviews in the upcoming months, so keep your eyes peeled for that! In the meantime, please refer to our documentation on how you can set up your external sharing review policy if you haven’t already done so.

Quickly identify groups with teams using ShareGate

Microsoft 365 groups in your tenant don’t always have an associated team. Without a clear idea of which of your groups are associated to a team, Teams migration can be a confusing process. For instance, you might find the group in the Explorer, but not when you’re migrating Teams. That’s because those groups don’t have an associated team for you to migrate.

That’s why we’ve added a new Is team connected property to the properties of Microsoft 365 groups in the Explorer. That way, you can easily see which groups have a team connected, and better plan for your Teams migration.

In ShareGate 15.1, you can also find teams in your tenant with a new custom report, using the new Is team connected filter that’s been added for the Microsoft 365 group object type.

Check out our documentation for more information on custom reports.

Other changes and improvements

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

• ShareGate:
  • [Release 15.1]: If you’ve changed your password following a migration setup, you can now also update your credentials for your scheduled tasks. That way, you no longer have to reschedule your tasks every time you’ve changed your password. Check out the release notes for all improvements and bug fixes.

• ShareGate:
  • We’ve improved the status emails you receive, providing clear summary statistics on external sharing review completions.

Coming soon

We’re always working hard on new features and improvements based on our users’ needs and requests. Here’s a sneak peak of what’s coming up next on the product roadmap:

See how inactive teams have evolved over time with ShareGate’s new graphs

We get it, it isn’t always easy to see just how your tenant has evolved over time, especially when it comes to the activity status of your teams. That’s because while you and your owners are working hard to clean up inactive resources to avoid clutter, new ones turn idle and are added to the pile. With this in mind, the Product team revamped the Dashboard tab, where you’ll be shown an overview of your inactive teams, how they’ve changed with time, who acted on them, and which actions were taken by owners.

Ask owners, on-demand, to act on their inactive team or group with ShareGate

Following in the footsteps of our latest release, our teams are To make cleaning up inactive teams and groups quicker and easier, you’ll soon be able to ask owners of any inactive teams or groups, on-demand, to either keep, delete, or archive their idle resource. With the options to contact owners via email or our Teams chatbot, you’ll be able to contact owners via the communication method that is most convenient for you.

Do you manage Teams or SharePoint? We need your expertise!

It seems like Microsoft 365’s collaboration apps—like Teams and SharePoint—are more popular than White Claws this year! And we’re learning that these tools aren’t that easy for IT to manage and govern. So, our Research team wants to know more about how you’re managing these apps.

If you’ve bought a third-party tool (other than for migration) to help you manage SharePoint or Teams, or if you’ve built your own admin tools (scripts, reports, provisioning, etc.), we’d love to hear about your experience.

Take the survey!

Learn how to manage and secure Teams using ShareGate during weekly webinars

Starting September 8th, our Customer Success team will be hosting weekly webinars, every Wednesday, covering the different ways you can achieve a more organized and secure environment using ShareGate. We’ll share tricks to maintain a clutter-free tenant, best practices when it comes to keeping Teams tidy and secure, and tips you can implement on a day-to-day basis to keep things in check.

Learn more about our upcoming webinars and sign up for the next one here.