ShareGate product update: September 2021

Fall is here, and our Product team has been on a roll! We’ll cover what’s changed with this September 2021 update in your ShareGate apps.

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

What’s new

In the last month, we’ve extended our ‘Ask owner(s)’ feature to the inactivity detection policy within ShareGate. This means that you can now easily collaborate with owners, on-demand, to clean up obsolete groups and teams. Also fresh out of the oven is ShareGate’s revamped Dashboard, giving you more insight on how inactive teams in your tenant have progressed through time.

Easily clean up inactive teams and groups, on-demand, with owners’ help

Following the success we’ve seen with ‘Ask owner(s)’ on-demand, to select a purpose and a sensitivity to their team, it was a no-brainer that we had to bring it to our most popular feature: the inactivity detection policy. In a nutshell, this policy sets a threshold of a specific number of days, after which a team is flagged as inactive if no activity in Teams, Outlook or SharePoint has been detected. 

This new addition allows you to ask owners of specific inactive teams and groups, whenever you need, to clean them up – whether it’s deleting, keeping or archiving them. Since it isn’t always easy to know what needs to be done with a team or group once it’s been flagged as inactive, you’ll get access to valuable information to keep your tenant clean and tidy, with less than half the effort. Say goodbye to guessing or manually contacting owners for answers that you then have to implement within Microsoft. Instead, contact select teams’ owners on-demand via email, or ask our chatbot to poke them directly in Teams, where they’re already working.

You can even decide to automate this feature so that as soon as a team or group turns inactive, ShareGate automatically contacts its owners to clean it up. Once it’s automated, there’s nothing else for you to do. The decision is up to the owner, and whatever action they choose to take is effective immediately.

For individuals you don’t want to disturb, simply add their information to your Do not disturb list, and we won’t get in touch with them.

Interested in learning more about this feature? Check out our release blog, and our documentation, so you’re ready to make the most out of it!

See how inactive teams have progressed through time

We’ve revamped our Dashboard so that you can clearly see whether the number of inactive teams have increased, decreased, or stayed the same ever since you activated ShareGate’s inactivity detection policy, or within the time period you’ve set.

Based on our customer data, while the number of teams in a tenant increased by an average of 50% last year, around 20% of total teams are actually inactive. This makes keeping track of how exactly inactive teams have progressed through time quite a challenge.

With our new Dashboard, you’ll also see who’s cleaned up more inactive teams – you or owners, and also what percentage of teams were kept versus deleted, archived or are still in limbo. The list of recommendations ensures that you’ve properly set up and optimized the different policies.

And if you’re wondering what happened to our external sharing reviews progress board, not to worry. You can still keep track of reviews in progress and those that have been completed, directly from the Dashboard.

This upgrade equips you with the insight you need to see the impact of ShareGate on your tenant, to evaluate and improve your governance policies so that you’re one step closer to securing your tenant.

Check out our documentation for more information on the Dashboard.

Other changes and improvements

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

• ShareGate:
  • [Patch 15.1.2]: Missing file extensions will now be added when you migrate documents from Google Drive to SharePoint. Check out the patch notes for all improvements and bug fixes.

• ShareGate: We’ve now removed the concept of entrusting team and group owners for the inactivity detection policy, which means that owners do not need to be entrusted to take action on this policy. Read the release notes for more.