Those IT professionals within an organisation who are responsible for overseeing the management of Office 365 Groups will now have three new tools to help them with this, following the announcement of their release by Microsoft.
The first of these new features provides enterprise IT departments with the option of adding content retention policies, while the second of them provides the option of classifying emails and documents through the use of labels. The third of the new tools sees Microsoft making good on its previously announced commitment to trigger a grace period of 30 days during which IT pros can restore a group they have previously deleted. These new tools follow on from those rolled out by the software giant during the summer of last year.
Groups represents a relatively new Office 365 feature that the company has made available for tenancies. It enables anyone who is using it to deploy those Office 365 applications that are supported by it for the creation of a group. Once they have been set up, these groups receive automatic member access to a Sites Library within SharePoint Online that they can use to store files. They are also provided with access to a OneNote notebook, tool for planning, calendar and common mailbox. These new Office 365 Groups retention policies are applicable to both a group’s SharePoint site and mailbox.
Policy settings for the group can be used to determine whether the content within it is erased over a chosen time period or retained permanently, with IT professionals deploying the ‘Retention page’ found within the management portal of the Security and Compliance Centre for specifying these settings. Chosen policies for retention are then applied by default across all of an organisation’s Office 365 applications, but IT staff can select policies for individual users or locations, or the entire organisation if preferred.
The labels feature lets organisations use the type of content in question to specify actions. This means that the label a document is given can determine policies for its retention, for example, with IT staff being able to allow the manual creation of document labels by end users or the automatic application of them – although a subscription to the E5 Enterprise plan is required before the latter option can be accessed. Microsoft is keen for organisations to use this new feature for the classification of content, rather than the retention tags available with Exchange Online or the information and records management policies of SharePoint Online.
The deletion restoration function is also being described as ‘soft delete’ and allows for the restoration of any Office 365 Group that has been deleted for up to 30 days afterwards. Once that period of time has elapsed, the deletion of this group cannot be reversed.
From the sound of it, these three features will improve the experience of those enterprises using Office 365. If you would like to find out how the solutions we create can improve your enterprise, call WM Reply right away.