ShareGate product update: July 2021

Wondering what’s changed in your ShareGate apps in the past month? You’re in the right place. Here’s your July 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

In July, on the ShareGate side, we’ve now made it possible for you to manage and adapt both your inactivity detection and external sharing review policies based on a team or group’s purpose and sensitivity.

We’ve also released a new feature that allows you to contact owners of specific teams and groups on-demand to fill in the blanks about a missing purpose or sensitivity.

Manage and adapt custom policies based on group purpose and sensitivity in ShareGate

You can now customize your inactivity detection and external sharing review policies based on a team or group’s purpose and sensitivity. This means you can clean up shorter-lived teams more frequently while also ensuring that the validity of externally shared files, especially those in confidential teams, are reviewed more often. That way, you get to keep your tenant clutter-free and secure.

In order to do that, you simply need to set a shorter inactivity threshold, say 60 days, for time-based teams like “External project” since they tend to be shorter-lived. If you don’t clean them up, they’ll pile up quickly, creating a mess in your tenant. Whereas for teams you know tend to live on, like departmental ones, they’d be better off with a longer inactivity threshold. That way, both you and owners will be notified less frequently to clean them up if no activity is detected.

By customizing the frequency at which team owners are asked to review externally shared links based on the team’s sensitivity, you make sure that people only have access to the things they should. Regular reviews reduce the risk of your sensitive information being accessible to people who should no longer have access to it. Ideally, this means owners of “Confidential” teams would have to review their external links more frequently than owners of “General” ones.

To set the inactivity threshold for your different purpose tags, or to set the external sharing review recurrences for your sensitivity tags, simply go to the Settings page and input the threshold and recurrence, in days, that you think is most appropriate for your business.

Read our announcement to learn more about customizing policies based on purpose and sensitivity.

Ask owners, on-demand, for missing team purpose and sensitivity using ShareGate

You can now ask our Teams chatbot to poke owners to fill in the blanks about missing purpose and sensitivity for all the teams and groups in your environment, whether they were created before or after you activated ShareGate. This on-demand collaboration helps you gather the information needed to better understand why users create teams and how they’re being used.

All you have to do is filter by team or group missing either a purpose or sensitivity from the Manage page, select the team(s) you want the chatbot to reach, and click the “Ask owner(s)” on the bottom right.

If you want the chatbot to automatically contact owners whenever a team is missing either a purpose or sensitivity, simply toggle on “Automate categorization policies” from the Settings page.

Whether you choose to contact owners on-demand or automatically, one thing’s for certain, this feature will better equip you to make the informed decisions needed to ensure the safety and security of your Teams.

For more information on our “Ask owners” feature, please read our release blog.

Other changes and improvements

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

• ShareGate:
  • [Patch 15.0.4]: We fixed an authentication-related bug that could have previously caused your migration to fail with an Object disposed exception error. Read the patch notes for more. 
  • [Patch 15.0.2]: We fixed a performance issue that occurred when you were migrating multiple Teams or private channels. Also, all team channels are now also copied during a migration. Read the patch notes for more. 

• ShareGate: 
  • We’ll now use the email sender account name in the email body of the External Sharing review notifications to owners instead of using the name of the account that activated the policy. 

Coming soon

We might be halfway through summer, but things have been going full steam ahead for us here at ShareGate. Here’s what’s coming up next on the product roadmap:

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 currently working on making it possible for you to ask owners of any inactive teams or groups, on-demand, to either keep, delete, or archive their idle resource. Whether you choose to contact owners via email or our Teams chatbot, one thing is for sure, you’ll be able to declutter your tenant more regularly and quickly.

Review guests in Teams using ShareGate

Our team has been working on improving the whole external review experience, by taking it up a notch as it’ll include the ability to review guests in your Teams. So, whether you decide to do it yourself or automate for owners to conduct reviews, you’ll be able to remove guests that should no longer be part of a team or group, followed by deleting any links to files that shouldn’t be shared externally anymore. By grouping these two features into one streamlined experience will truly ensure that your tenant stays secure, with the right people having access to the right things.

“Ask the Expert” weekly drop-in sessions

Our Customer Success team has been 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 about both ShareGate and ShareGate. It’s also the perfect opportunity to share your experience with your peers (and maybe learn a thing or two from them as well!).

Sessions covering ShareGate products take place twice a week. 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.

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