5 tips to breeze through managing your Microsoft 365 world

How it works

ShareGate gives you automated policies to help you maintain a secure and productive environment.

1. Inactivity detection

• ShareGate automatically finds inactive teams and sites in your tenant.
• Choose how many days without activity would qualify a team or site as inactive or leave ShareGate’s default 90-day threshold.
• Get granular with what inactivity looks like according to a team’s purpose.
• Keep, archive or delete inactive teams yourself or manually send notifications to the owners to act on them.

2. External sharing review

• Set the frequency at which owners should review their shared links and guests.
• You can enable ShareGate to automatically notify owners via the Teams chatbot or email when it’s time to review external links and guests. Owners can then remove any unnecessary links and guests.

3. Tags

• Customize your policies using purpose and sensitivity tags for security, administration, and the initial rollout.

Purpose tags

• Create purpose tags to categorize teams and groups according to the type of work being done.
• Apply tags yourself or let ShareGate prompt owners to choose the tag they feel best represents the purpose of the teams and groups they create.

Sensitivity tags

• Automatically update privacy, external sharing, and guest access settings accordingly.
• Create a range of tags to suit your needs, edit and maintain existing tags, and monitor how they’re being applied.

How it works

Building a template is simple!

To create a Teams template:

• Click Create template
• Select Team from the drop-down menu
• Name your template and add a description
• Define the rules of the template, including:
  • Adding the minimum number of owners required
  • Adding a naming convention (prefix, suffix, or both)
  • Adding the number of approvers
  • Whether the team will be public or private
  • Pre-determined channels
  • Adding security settings, such as privacy levels, external sharing settings, and guest access permissions
• You can also attach an active SharePoint site and sync its content and structure to use as a blueprint.
• And you can associate provisioned sites with a hub site.

To create a SharePoint template:

• Click Create template
• Select SharePoint site from the drop-down menu
• Name your template and add a description.
• Define the rules of the template, including:
  • Adding the minimum number of owners required
  • Adding a naming convention (prefix, suffix, or both)
  • Adding the number of approvers
• You can also attach an active SharePoint site and sync its content and structure to use as a blueprint.
• And you can associate provisioned sites with a hub site.

What is it?

• It’s an app integrated into Microsoft Teams. Users can easily access it in the Teams navigation bar.
• It’s where users create and manage their workspaces from start to finish.
• Everyone sees the teams and sites they own and are a part of and Teams meeting recordings.
• Users can review their external shares from the app.

Communication template

We get it. Everyone needs to feel confident with their new tech. To help you get users on board with the ShareGate end-user app, we created a sample email that can help you announce the implementation of ShareGate’s Teams app for Microsoft 365 provisioning within your organization.

Support your end users

Share these quick how-to guides so users get the hang of using the ShareGate end-user app:

• What is the ShareGate end-user app?
• How to create a new team with a template in ShareGate 
• How to assign yourself as point of contact
• How to take action on inactivity 
• How to review external shares
• How to take action on external sharing 
• How to approve team creation requests
• How to find meeting recordings
• Who are admins, owners, and end users?

What is it?

Score some quick wins for managing your environment with these neat tools to keep things in check.

• Head to the Manage page for an overview of your teams, groups, and communication sites.
  • Keep things tidy by catching inactive teams, orphaned teams, guests, and externally-shared links.
  • Check the box beside the team or group names, and a bulk action menu will appear to show you the different actions you can take.
  • Click the gear ⚙️  on the inactivity, purpose, guests/shared links, or sensitivity tile to navigate to the Policies page, where you can update your policies as needed.

• Filter the page to find specific teams and groups and drill down into your data.

• Customize your columns to any view of your teams or groups list.
• Export as a CSV file for reference and analysis.

Here’s what Astrid from Oxford Instruments had to say about these tools in conversation with Benjamin Niaulin, ShareGate’s VP of Product.

How it works

At ShareGate, we found that a few types of tools add value to any IT team managing Microsoft 365.

• Hop over to the Dashboard for a snapshot of what’s happening in your tenant.
  • See what users are creating
  • Monitor tenant health
  • Get recommendations to help you stay on top of things

• Click on the gear ⚙️ to set up notifications to receive:
  • A monthly digest about what’s happening, including reports on developing problems and actions you can take. 
  • Alerts via the chatbot when a team becomes inactive or orphaned, when a new team is created, and when a user deletes a team.

• Click on Activity in the top right to view your activity log, filter, and export.

How it works

ShareGate lets you archive content from unused teams and groups, so you don’t have to worry about losing anything important. You can use the default ShareGate Azure for free or your own Azure storage for your archived content. 

What’s archived:

• Files and folders in libraries
• Files and folders that were shared in Teams private channels (if present)
• Documents sent by the group mailbox (if set to save in the SharePoint library)
• Documents shared on Planner or Viva Engage (formerly Yammer)
• List attachments
• SharePoint’s hierarchy (transformed into folders)
• SharePoint site
• Teams and their content
• ~Conversations
• ~Channel structure, tabs, and apps
• ~Permissions

What’s not archived:

• SharePoint-related metadata, including list items and document properties
• SharePoint permissions
• Workspace-specific content (except for team content)