What’s new – 2024.5.

Microsoft 365 Workspace Lifecycle Management: Ask Owners for Custom Metadata ^2024.5

Workspace lifecycle management and governance can be very cumbersome for admins if they don’t understand their purpose or have limited visibility to the key details about them. To gather information about departments and teams associated with workspaces, whether they are project-based, expected end dates, and much more, they need to get in touch with workspace owners directly.

We have created a new feature to enable admins to send a request to team owners and ask them to provide necessary metadata and missing information on demand. Once you collect the metadata you can easily decide if specific workspaces need some governance policies applied and utilize our rules engine to continously enforce them. For example, you can ask for a regular access review for the Marketing department as they often work with external collaborators on short-term projects.

How it works:

• Go to Settings – Governance – Custom metadata and add everything that you need to collect info about (data inputs can be text, people, yes/no, date, etc.).
• Open the Sites overview and choose the Sites which you need to collect metadata for.
• Use the menu in the side panel and click on the Manage Metadata drop-down and choose Ask Owners.
• Select the Custom metadata options which you need (e.g. ask for primary contact, project date or anything else you need).
• Owners will receive an email and task and will have 15 days to complete the task.
• Once they are done, admins can review their inputs.

Microsoft 365 Provisioning Templates: Copy from an Existing Workspace ^2024.5

Microsoft 365 provisioning with Syskit Point brings efficiency for IT teams, stops uncontrolled sprawl and simplifies the process for end users. You can eliminate complex approval processes, reduce support tickets and automate the process easily; create templates which follow your security requirements, set up approval workflows, collect metadata and enforce various governance policies in the background.

We’ve now added a new option within our provisioning templates. You can now use an existing workspace as a template for creating new workspaces. Choosing this option will copy channels, apps, tabs, and settings to every new team that uses this template. This feature uses the PnP provisioning engine by Microsoft in the background which allows modeling a site with an extra set of configuration capabilities. With our new advanced provisioning, you get valuable capabilities, especially if you frequently need to initiate projects that require consistency across workspaces (such as specific channels, files, etc.).

A quick feature recap and reminder – security is a top priority, tailor each template for its purpose: manage how owners and members are added, set up sharing settings, assign sensitivity labels, ask owners for custom metadata to fill along with their request, apply governance policies, set approval processes and template visibility.

Governance of the workspace lifecycle starts with provisioning, and we want to help you streamline the process from the beginning, control creation, secure data, and simplify the process even more!