Microsoft 365 document management, search and administration updates
This is a detailed look at recent Microsoft 365 document management, search and administration updates. It’s Part 2 in our series of updates from Ignite 2021 -- check out Part 1 focused on collaboration features.
Note: Most of these features require premium licensing such as Microsoft 365 E5, Syntex, or Advanced Compliance add-ons. Reach out if you have questions or need advice on licensing!
1. Syntex updates
Syntex is a set of features that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to classify documents and extract metadata.
When Syntex was first released we did a webinar centered around building models that you train to extract important metadata from the document or form. The Syntex models we discussed continue to get updates, and we’re also seeing the feature set connect to more parts of the Microsoft 365 platform.
Retention and sensitivity labels settings to models
Syntex now connects to Microsoft 365 labels. Syntex will soon have the ability to apply retention and sensitivity labels automatically to documents processed through models:
Compliance settings added to Syntex models in Microsoft 365. Image courtesy of Microsoft
These settings will make it easier to use the Syntex-processed documents for retention or records management.
Content assembly (“intelligent templates”)
Syntex will also get a new feature called Content Assembly. This will make it easier to create “intelligent templates” based on existing documents. This promises to make it easier to turn existing documents into templates that are available to end-users in a library to create contracts, invoices, statements of work, purchase orders and more.
A template auto-assembled from Syntex, with fillable placeholders available for end-users. Image courtesy of Microsoft
This enhancement should make it easier for organizations and teams to use document templates, and the templates themselves won’t have to be manually created from scratch in Word anymore. There’s more to see with Syntex, so learn more about the latest Syntex features in the Microsoft blog post.
If you’re aren’t using Syntex, we have a few suggestions for managing document templates using the built-in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 options. Check it out!
2. Information protection
Trainable classifiers
Microsoft is providing an expanded set of trainable classifiers in the Compliance Center to cover common business scenarios. For example, you can use these to detect contracts, budget proposals, IT incident reports, tax forms, non-disclosure agreements, insurance forms, documents that contain terms and conditions, and other sensitive material.
New templates for trainable classifiers in the Compliance Center
Once the system detects the sensitive types of content you care about, a label is automatically applied, and then you can use these to apply retention policies for records management. Of course, you can also add your own trainable classifier after the initial indexing is complete (which can take up to 14 days).
It gets us one step closer to automating records management with an improved classification engine in Microsoft 365. See the full list of trainable classifiers and more examples in this article.
Adaptive scopes
Adaptive scopes were announced a couple of months ago pre-Ignite, but it’s worth highlighting here for those using or considering Microsoft 365 for records management.
With M365 records management, you can define “static” retention policies: i.e. you pre-identify the locations for retention such as selecting the OneDrive accounts or SharePoint sites where you want retention to apply. As new sites are created, or new users join your organization, scopes need to be manually updated. Not a great solution for most dynamic organizations!
Static scopes work well if you want retention to be the same across an entire app – such as keeping all Teams chats for the same period.
However, many organizations need retention for a specific department, user role or region that differs across the organization. To do this without adaptive scopes, administrators need to write custom scripts that update policies when sites or users change.
This is where adaptive policy scopes in Microsoft 365 are useful. They let you target groups, users or sites based on their attributes. For example, all HR employees can have Teams chats and OneDrive content retention that’s different from Finance. Or you can manage all the SharePoint sites that start with a specific term (which makes having governance on SharePoint site names and URLs even more important).
New information governance features in Microsoft 365: Adaptive scopes and policy lookup
With adaptive scopes, Microsoft 365 dynamically manages who or what is in or out of each scope. With this comes a new policy lookup feature to figure out what policy applies to a user or a site.
More detail about this feature and how to use it is available here: Adaptive Policy Scopes Microsoft 365 Records Management
3. eDiscovery
Organizations that have the Advanced eDiscovery license will get some new features, especially for managing versions and doing legal holds.
eDiscovery will be expanded to search historical versions, and legal reviewers will be able identify the version of a document shared at the time of communication. This is more important now with cloud apps, because a user might have linked to a document in an email or a chat, and not attached it as a separate item. Previously this made a discovery request harder because the linked version could have changed since the time of the message. Microsoft will ship an enhancement to eDiscovery that makes it easier to find the version that is linked to, which is critical in the case of a legal hold or discovery case.
See the version of the document at the time it was shared under Advanced eDiscovery. Image courtesy of Microsoft
Take a deep dive into the features here: Discover document version insights and more with Microsoft Advanced eDiscovery
4. Search
There are useful enhancements and tweaks in Microsoft Search, as well as more administrator controls.
Answers, acronyms, bookmarks
A bucket of related features helps search administrators tweak search results to promote authoritative content from across the organization. Microsoft Search can both mine acronyms and answers from your content, and provides the search configuration options for admins to curate bookmarks, answers and acronyms.
Bookmarks are based on keywords, whereas Q&A is based on queries that users phrase as a question:
Search query phrased as keywords with a “bookmark “ authoritative result
Search query phrased as a question with an answer result that is extracted automatically by Microsoft Search.
We recommend setting these up to make easy improvements to the search experience. This video is a good in-depth view of Microsoft Search features that also discusses other improvements with federation and search connectors:
5. Admin Center
Teams is growing in many organizations, and with that comes a growth of SharePoint sites behind-the-scenes.
Today it’s a disconnected experience to see all the Teams and their associated sites and channels. Microsoft is adding a better view to the SharePoint admin center to see Teams, sites, channels and a few top-level settings in one place:
Manage Teams connected sites and channels from the admin center. Image courtesy of Microsoft
This helps with governance of Teams and SharePoint by giving administrators better insight into the volume of sites. It looks easy to sort and see which sites are Teams-connected, and which ones are not – which can be an important insight to encourage a consistent level of adoption of these tools in your organization. With more data comes the opportunity to take action, so we look forward to seeing if this helps alleviate some of the governance and Teams sprawl challenges we know many organizations are facing.
Need help with SharePoint and Teams governance? See how we helped the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba by designing everything in SharePoint to be accessible through Teams.
Tenant rename
Did you call you tenant something that you now regret? Or did your organization go through a rebrand or merger that changed the company name?
With Office 365, we’ve been stuck with the tenant name chosen at the start. If something changes with the organization name, it wasn’t possible to rename the tenant. Not anymore!
Soon it will be possible to rename the tenant through Powershell – with one caveat: if you have fewer than 1,000 sites and OneDrive URLs. Microsoft may change this limit in the future.
Instructions on how to change your SharePoint domain name are here.
Bonus! Links to updated learning material
Compliance, information protection and Records Management features in Microsoft 365 show up in a few solution areas within the platform. It’s a vast suite of features that covers Azure and the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center, so we recommend going through guidance on Microsoft Learn to learn more about the suite if you’re new to it.
There are a few learning paths we recommend, and these are updated frequently.
For beginners and a high-level overview:
For intermediate users:
Microsoft 365 is a huge platform and changes frequently. We know it’s hard to stay on top of it all! Reach out for demos and advice about the new capabilities of Microsoft 365, and let’s discuss the changes that matter for your organization.
