ShareGate product update: March 2021

Wondering what’s changed in your ShareGate apps in the last month? You’re in the right place. Here’s your March 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 March, we shipped ShareGate 14.2 which introduced overdue improvements in how we handle the auto-assign as site collection administrator process. We also made it possible for you to migrate private channels in Microsoft Teams so you can easily move any channel to any team.

Get more control over how ShareGate assigns site collection administrator permissions

You need site collection admin permissions for most operations within ShareGate. Without these permissions, you’re unable to do any transformations on your sites, run reports, or use quick actions in the Explorer. In order to save you time and avoid manual work, we came up with a way to automatically give you the right permissions to do these operations. However, the method we previously used to do this had major drawbacks.  

With ShareGate 14.2, we’ve completely revamped the way we automatically assign site collection admin permissions so you can have more flexibility and control over where they are applied.  

When you enable auto-assign, you’ll now be able to apply it to all your environments or only selected tenants or farms. You’ll also be able to decide if you want to apply it to SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. That way, if you only want to do operations on SharePoint site collections, you can avoid having being named co-owner on thousands of OneDrive user accounts and raising security concerns throughout your business. 

We’ve also made it possible to remove these permissions once you’re done with your operations. 

Check out our documentation for more on how this feature works.

Migrate private channels in Microsoft Teams with ShareGate

Last year, we introduced our Microsoft Teams migration tool in ShareGate, to help you organize and restructure Teams. Our first release back in May focused on tenant-to-tenant migrations, while our latest release in December enabled you to perform team-to-team migrations. But there was one big thing missing in those releases: the ability to migrate private channels. 

When you need to perform a Teams migration, leaving private channels behind is simply not an option. With this new release, you’ll be able to move any channel wherever you want in a few clicks. We’ve also added the ability to adjust team membership at the destination pre-migration to help you make sure the right people have access to the right things on the right channels.  

Read our announcement to learn more about private channel migrations in Microsoft Teams. 

Other changes and improvements

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

• ShareGate:
  • [Release 14.2]: We’ve made many updates, including increasing the Microsoft 365 file upload limit to 100GB when you migrate in Insane mode and adding support for the new Microsoft 365 list template style when you migrate teams. Check out the release notes for all improvements and bug fixes.
  • [Patch 14.1.2]: We fixed a problem that would prevent you from accessing Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams in the app when you use Azure Active Directory conditional access. See the patch notes.
• ShareGate: For increased visibility, we now validate, at the connection of a custom storage for Archive, if performance is set to ‘Standard’. Note that ‘Premium’ is not supported.

Coming soon

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

Get notified when something’s up with your tenant in ShareGate

We understand the value of seeing, at a quick glance, what’s been going on with your teams in ShareGate. That’s why we’re working on an automated digest sent monthly directly to your inbox from the app. It will provide a summary of your users’ latest activities and highlight the most pressing issues that require your attention such as overdue inactive teams and teams with the wrong security settings. By bringing these issues forward, it’ll contribute to minimizing their impact on the organization and security of your tenant.

Customize the frequency of external sharing reviews based on group sensitivity in ShareGate

Now that we’ve added the ability to customize when your group is flagged as inactive, what’s next? Later this month, you’ll be able to customize the frequency at which links of externally shared files are reviewed, based on a group’s level of sensitivity. This means you’ll be able to set more frequent reviews of information shared in higher-risk groups, lowering the risk of exposing data for a long period of time to those who should no longer have access.

Incremental Teams migration in ShareGate

As promised, we’re currently working on incremental Teams migrations. This will enable you to only move over what’s changed since your last migration. Stay tuned for this release later this spring. We’re also looking at helping you migrate Planner plans that are attached to teams, which should also come in Q2. 

New white paper: ShareGate’s State of Microsoft 365

With so many changes and challenges, the ShareGate team wanted to find out how the Microsoft community and our users responded to the events of 2020 to better understand how the industry needs to move forward. You can now read the results gathered from customer and community surveys (thanks for your help!), data-based insights, and Microsoft MVP interviews in our first-ever benchmark report.

Research and product feedback

We’re always on the lookout for participants to give us their honest opinions on what we do at ShareGate, in the form of usability tests, surveys, etc. Help us help you better secure and simplify your Microsoft 365 journey. To take part in future research projects, simply sign up for our participant pool here and our research team will be in touch!

And 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!