Automatic storage management in Microsoft 365

Growing pains – you’ve undoubtedly heard of those, but have you experienced them happening to your business? A company’s growing pains are the other side of the success coin many expanding companies might encounter. As you grow your business, hire more people, expand your products, and hire team members from different locations… you’re actively scaling your digital infrastructure.

When the data you collect grows, so does the need to ensure your data’s security. Not to mention that, without an active approach, managing and keeping track of your document versions and storage, in general, can become a complex task. It will take up time you could spend focusing on the other, debatably more fun, aspects of your company’s steady growth.

So, what can you do about it?

Enhanced Version Control in M365 Archive

For starters, Microsoft 365 Archive offers automation tools for storage management with a feature called Enhanced Version Control, previously called Intelligent Versioning. If you wish to learn more, here’s everything you need to know about intelligent versioning with Microsoft 365. In this article you can expect to learn some potential pain points with this exceptional feature and how you can streamline your document management, cut costs, and boost productivity by incorporating Syskit Point as your go-to for storage automation.

How to streamline your data growth

The auto-save feature was a blessing in disguise for many, allowing users to restore a previous file version in case of a mistake and providing an effective safeguard against any accidental deletions or unwanted changes to documents. However, this came with a host of challenges. With dozens or even hundreds of file versions backed up daily, each saved version consumes storage space. Without proper management, this can significantly increase your storage costs, especially for larger organizations.

And so, knowing this, perhaps you have decided to take control of your storage management and keep up to date with your file versioning. Only now you might reach another potential road block – whose job is this?

You might want to delegate this to your IT department. However, aside from being time-consuming, the IT department likely won’t have the full picture of each workspace, what file versions should be kept, or which documents the workspace needs or is ready to archive. So, maybe each SharePoint Site, Microsoft 365 Team, or Microsoft 365 Group owner should be in charge of regularly maintaining the health of all files in their workspace and keeping their document versioning under control. At Syskit, we refer to this approach as collaborative governance.

The challenges with collaborative governance

It seems like a simple solution, but it can also provide an opening for future issues to arise. The task can prove time-consuming without a proper solution in place. What happens is that while the owners try to speed up their work so they can focus on other pressing matters, some files might slip through the cracks. Not to mention that those less tech-savvy might find it difficult to navigate Microsoft 365 versioning.

So, while Microsoft 365 offers great versioning features, some companies might seek more advanced control and insights into their data usage on an easier-to-navigate platform.

That’s where Syskit Point comes in — your one-stop shop for streamlining storage management and ensuring a healthy and secure workspace environment.

Ready, set, automate versioning limits!

A key feature of Syskit Point is its automated versioning feature, which builds on Microsoft’s native versioning tools by offering more advanced options, detailed reporting, and a user-friendly interface. This allows businesses to manage their documents better, maintain compliance, and ensure data integrity.

While Microsoft 365 automatically creates new versions of documents, Syskit Point offers advanced control over these versions. It allows you to:

• Set specific versioning policies for different document libraries or groups. This gives you full control over how long versions are kept and which versions are prioritized.
• Automatically archive or delete older versions based on your needs and preferences, which helps you manage storage costs and avoid unnecessary data bloat.

Syskit Point also provides detailed insight into who is accessing your documents and making changes. This is crucial for compliance and security and can help you identify and manage any unauthorized access. You’ll also get reporting tools that allow you to generate detailed reports on storage management for SharePoint Online across your organization and set up alerts for specific activities:

On the other hand, Syskit Point’s versioning limits help you manage storage costs by automatically archiving or deleting old versions according to your specified policies. This prevents the accumulation of unnecessary data, minimizes the risk of human-based errors, and lets your team spend less time keeping their file versions up to date and more time focusing on core business tasks.

Not to mention, as your business grows, Syskit Point grows with you. The Syskit Point platform is highly scalable, which allows you to manage versioning across large, complex Microsoft 365 environments without losing control or visibility. If your business needs one centralized platform where your data can be easily accessed and managed without taking up extra time, resources, and expenses – you’ve just found your solution.

By this point, you’ve hopefully come to the same conclusion—utilizing Syskit Point can prove a highly valuable investment in your business. But how does the automated versioning limits feature work?

Let us give you a quick introduction.

Syskit Point and automated versioning

While our documentation page offers a detailed step-by-step guide on how to set up and use storage versioning limits in Syskit Point, here’s a little example of how you might implement this feature and how it can benefit you.

First, you’ll set up your custom versioning limits:

• Syskit Point enables administrators to define specific versioning limits for different document libraries or sites within Microsoft 365. This means that you can set a maximum number of versions that will be retained for each document.
• These limits can be tailored to different parts of the organization based on the importance of the documents and the frequency of updates, which provides you with flexible and efficient version control.
• For example, a highly active project site might be set to keep 50 versions of each document, which ensures that a comprehensive history is maintained. Meanwhile, a less critical library might only retain the last 10 versions to conserve storage.

Next comes the automated versioning cleanup:

• Once the versioning limits are configured and you’ve selected automated versioning, Syskit Point automatically manages document versions by deleting older versions that exceed the specified limit you previously set up. This process happens behind the scenes without requiring any manual effort from IT staff or others.
• For example, if a document in a library with a 20-version limit is edited for the 21st time, Syskit Point automatically deletes the oldest version and keeps the most recent 20 versions. This ensures that only the most relevant document history is maintained while freeing up valuable storage space.
• This automated cleanup helps prevent version bloat, where outdated or unnecessary versions accumulate, potentially consuming excessive storage and complicating document management.

Additionally, Syskit Point provides detailed insight into how versioning is being managed across the organization. Administrators can monitor versioning activity, review the number of versions stored for each document, and adjust policies as needed.

Through a highly intuitive dashboard, IT teams can see which libraries are approaching their versioning limits, identify areas where storage might be optimized, and ensure that critical versions are not inadvertently deleted.

This level of control allows businesses to fine-tune their versioning policies, balancing the need for maintaining older file versions with the necessity of efficient storage management.

If you’re more of the type that likes to see how this feature works in action, you’re in luck. Below, we’ll include a use case example that might give you an even better understanding of why using Syskit Point will completely revolutionize your approach to data and storage management in your company.

Use case: The (fictional) ACME example

Let’s say that ACME Corp is a mid-sized financial services company with approximately 500 employees spread across multiple offices. The company relies heavily on Microsoft 365 for their day-to-day operations, particularly SharePoint and OneDrive, where all client documents, financial reports, and compliance-related files are stored. Given the sensitive nature of the data they handle, ensuring data security and compliance is their top priority.

ACME Corp, however, has faced several challenges with the default Microsoft 365 versioning features:

• With hundreds of files being updated daily, a file’s version history quickly becomes difficult to navigate. The IT team has struggled to manage storage efficiently, as old versions keep accumulating without a clear retention policy.
• The company needs a more robust system to track document access and changes made to documents for audit purposes. Microsoft 365’s built-in tools offer basic versioning but lack the detailed reporting and compliance tracking ACME Corp requires.
• Occasional mistakes have been made, such as accidental deletions or incorrect modifications of critical files. Restoring previous versions was often time-consuming and, in some cases, confusing for non-technical staff.

Their ideal solution was to implement Syskit Point. Here’s how Syskit Point can address their challenges:

• Syskit Point allows ACME Corp to set customized versioning policies across different departments. For example, the Compliance department could retain up to 50 versions of key documents for 10 years, while the Marketing team’s files only retained the last 5 versions for 6 months. Old versions of documents are automatically archived or deleted based on these policies, which significantly reduces storage bloat and associated costs.
• Syskit Point provides comprehensive audit trails for document activities. The Compliance team could easily generate reports showing who accessed or modified a document and when the changes occurred.
• Syskit Point’s alert system can be configured to notify IT if there are any unusual spikes in document access or if critical files were edited or deleted unexpectedly. This feature helps prevent potential security breaches and ensures compliance with company policies.
• The IT department can use Syskit Point’s centralized dashboard to manage all document versioning across the company. This can provide them with a clear overview of document health, storage usage, and compliance status.

Overall, by offering custom versioning limits, automated cleanup, and comprehensive insights, Syskit Point addresses the key challenges of file version management—optimizing storage, maintaining critical documents, and ensuring compliance with your company’s policies. With Syskit Point, you get the flexibility to tailor versioning policies to your organization’s specific needs and the ability to automatically manage versions without burdening your IT team.

Ready to improve your storage management?

For businesses that rely on Microsoft 365 for collaboration and data management, Syskit Point is the best choice for automated versioning control. It not only enhances Microsoft 365’s existing capabilities but also provides the tools you need to protect your digital assets, streamline operations, and ultimately drive your business forward.