What’s new – 2024.2.

Microsoft 365 Storage Management vol.2 ^2024.2

With rapid workspaces (Microsoft Teams, Groups, SharePoint sites) and data growth, admins struggle to manage sprawl across various departments which leads to continuously purchasing extra storage due to storage shortages.​ This is why a few months ago we launched a new set of storage insights and optimization tools which brought you: powerful reporting to help you gain complete visibility over trends, policies and notifications to help you gain awareness to make timely decisions, and optimization tools to clean up and free up storage with just a few clicks.

We’ve continously been working on additional capabilities for SharePoint storage management in Microsoft 365, and below is an overview of what’s new.

Storage Metrics Report Uplift ^2024.2

The Tenant-wide Storage Metrics report shows a visualization of storage usage over time to help you identify potentially unusual spikes and understand what is taking up the most space to determine whether you need additional storage or if something needs additional optimization and cleanup. As the Storage Metrics report is your central place from where you can dig deeper into more insights and actions, we’ve added some useful new capabilities which will help you better understand potential savings areas and sort out the data for efficient reporting.

New Views can help you sort the data in this powerful report in different ways so you can easily see everything according to your needs:

• The Largest Sites view sorts the report based on site sizes. But you can also choose to sort it based on the largest growth trend in the last 7/30/90/180 days.
• The Potential Savings – Number of Versions view sorts the report based on the amount of saved storage you can achieve with the Clean Up action, keeping the defined number of file versions.
• The Potential Saving – Old Versions view sorts the report based on the amount of saved storage you get if running the Clean Up action, deleting file versions older than what you defined in the Storage Management settings.

A new Potential Savings calculator tile includes information on how much storage could be saved on the tenant level by removing all file versions older than X months or removing all file versions except for the last Y file versions. You can adjust this by clicking on the Settings icon inside this tile.

In case you still haven’t tried it, open the Storage Metrics reports from your homepage dashboard. The Storage tile is now also improved and includes information on how much storage you already saved by performing the Clean Up action as well as how much storage you can still potentially save.

Site Storage Limit Management ^2024.1

The new Change Storage Limit action was added to the Storage Metrics report. You can now customize and change the storage limit for each site, meaning that if you notice a certain site has a larger influx of data than others, you can increase the storage limit for that site while lowering the storage limit for others. Keep in mind that the cumulative storage for all your sites cannot exceed the total storage available for your tenant. Just click on a site you need to adjust and use the action in the right hand-side menu.

Set up alerts so that the site admin gets a timely notification when a site has reached a specific percentage of usage, which you can adjust, to avoid locking the site in case it exceeds the storage limit. Ensure business continuity and avoid storage shortages.

Bulk Storage Cleanup Actions ^2024.2

Continuous workspace sprawl, followed by Microsoft-enforced versioning, and the underlying costs of getting additional storage, are stressful and bring a lot of manual work for admins. This is why we enriched our set of storage optimization tools with a new powerful option.

The Clean Up File Versions action is now available directly on the Storage Metrics report when bulk selecting multiple workspaces! Once you select the workspaces, run the Clean Up action from the side menu, and free up your tenant storage even faster. The following options are available when running the Clean Up action: Old File Versions, Number Of Versions, All But The Last File Version. Our customers have collectively reclaimed up to 40% of their SharePoint Online storage since we launched these features – gain control and start your cleanup now.

Site Storage Reporting Improved ^2024.1

Storage management is an important task, as it directly impacts your monthly expenses and business continuity. Our tenant-wide Storage Metrics report is your starting point, but to get more details you can open the single Site Storage Metrics report which shows site growth trends, total size, split usage per file types, and more. This report has some significant improvements.

Now you can change the main report layout between two types of data structures: the flat Files Only view, which is the default, and the Site Structure view. To change the structure view for your report, click the Show by button located at the top right of the report.

What we’ve learned so far is that the biggest storage hoarders are Office files such as PPTs and videos, so we’ve added an easy-to-use View per File Type to help you pinpoint which files are causing your storage spikes with excessive versioning or simply by its size. File Type View supports Office files, Videos, Photos, and Other files and can help you easily detect potentially problematic files.

There is also a File Type tile on top of the Site Storage Metrics Report which is now drillable; when you click one of the displayed categories – Office, Videos, Photos, and Other – the report shows the selected file types.

As you may know, you can enable site owners to easily monitor and manage access to their workspaces through Syskit Point and now we’ve added an option for Collaborators to access Site Storage Metrics reports for their workspaces. This way they can easily detect for example if there are files that are using too much storage.

Microsoft 365 Governance: Custom Metadata in Rules ^2024.2

Managing and applying policies and detecting potential issues across Microsoft 365 workspaces usually takes time, IT tickets, and being reactive which leads to compliance risks and operational inefficiency. The Rules feature in Syskit Point lets you enable auto-applying governance policies across workspaces based on conditions you set up.

From now on, policy rules support several custom metadata types which you create and apply to your workspaces in Syskit Point or via third-party tools and then sync to Point. The following custom metadata types are supported: Text, Number, Date, Boolean Yes/No, Dropdown, and People (e.g. If you define custom metadata named Project End Date, the data type would be set to Date). The new predefined property is now also available – Created On – enabling you to utilize rules to apply governance policies to workspaces based on their creation date.

Here are some use cases examples. You want to define that for all project-based workspaces, which have guest users and enabled access requests, Point asks site owners to do a quarterly access review to make sure that external guests are regularly removed once they are done. Combine properties and custom metadata inside the conditions info to determine which workspaces will have a policy applied. Or you can set up workspaces purpose options under custom metadata and allow your site owners to choose from the predefined list in the dropdown; based on the selected purpose, easily apply a set of governance policies using the Rules engine.

Gain even more control, add more details to your rules, and let the platform do the work for you.