What’s New in Orchestry (May 2023)

2-step automated SharePoint & MS Teams archiving

Some of you may be familiar with Orchestry’s incredibly powerful automated SharePoint and Microsoft Teams archiving. If you’re not, make sure to read this blog.

In a nutshell, Orchestry admin can create and fully configure as many automated archival and deletion policies as they like and apply them to existing MS Teams and SharePoint sites, so archiving or deletion would happen automatically, depending on the policy firing triggers that were configured.

This automated archiving not only saves endless hours of manual work for IT Admins and end users alike but also helps to:

• Manage M365 sprawl
• Ensure data security
• Reduce storage costs

Automated archival are among some of the favorite and most frequently used features of Orchestry, as it brings immediate return on the investment in that platform – many of our customers are able to clean up over 75% of their unused Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups and SharePoint sites within the first couple of weeks of using Orchestry.

That said, with the very helpful feedback from our customers and partners, we wanted to take this functionality 2 steps further (pun 100% intended 😉 and introduce 2-step archiving.

What is 2-step archiving and why should you care?

Let’s imagine your organization operates in a highly regulated industry and is expected to hold onto certain assets for a set period of time. Traditionally, this can go one of many ways:

1. The Team or SharePoint site where the sensitive content that requires retention lives would stay active, even after it is no longer required to be used or accessed actively. This often creates confusion for the users of M365 tools and contributes to the sprawl of workspaces.
2. The Team of SharePoint site where the sensitive information lives would be archived manually. The IT Admin would then need to set a reminder to delete the content on some date in the future (this could be a couple of years in the future!). Naturally, the task may be forgotten, the IT Admin may move on to another department or elsewhere entirely, leaving the archived content living in your tenant indefinitely, adding to sprawl and high storage costs.

Regardless, this 2-step archiving requires a lot of manual labor.

There are many other scenarios where 2-step archiving may come in handy – for example, when a project is complete and the project participants no longer need to actively collaborate within the workspace on the said project but do need the extra time to backup or wrap up their work with any of the assets.

Welcome Orchestry’s 2-step automated SharePoint and Microsoft Teams archiving!

Although 2-step archiving is a brand new functionality in Orchestry, all exciting users of the platform can modify archiving policies they’ve already created in Orchestry and add a second step to them.

Let’s take a look at this functionality up close to see how easy it is to configure it (the whole process takes less than 5 minutes from start to finish).

Step 1: Begin to create a new archiving policy in Orchestry and select archiving method. The first step of archiving should always be “Archive in place”

Step 2: Add a second step to your policy

Step 3: Complete the required configuration of the first step of archiving

In this step, you will be able to configure everything from renaming the Team or SharePoint site (or adding a suffix to the name) to exactly which document versions you’d like to archive. You can also decide how the content Owners will be notified of the impending archiving – whether it’s thru Teams or email, and whether it’s just an FYI notification or it requires action taken by the Owners.

Step 4: Configure the second step in the SharePoint or Microsoft Teams archiving

In the second step, you can select whether to move the content to SharePoint Archive or delete it completely.

Step 5: Set up the interval of time between steps 1 & 2

Step 6: Configure policy execution

Select whether the second step will execute automatically, and will let the original (or new!) content owners know, or will require their approval.

Done! From there, you can apply your freshly baked 2-step archiving policy to any existing Teams or SharePoint sites, or even to templates.

The execution logs will keep you appraised on when the policies fire and the outcomes of each job, so you can sit, back, relax and watch Orchestry do all the heavy lifting for you.

Guest request notifications improved

Another one of Orchestry’s heavily used and appreciated features is Guest user management. If you’re not familiar with this functionality – you’re in for a treat with this blog.

In brief, Guest user management features and functionality allow you to take control over Guest users, from the moment they are invited into your tenant, to the moment it’s time to revoke their access.

Today we will focus on the adding of the Guests part.

With Orchestry’s Guest user management features, you will be able to create Guest request policies. These policies will enforce the collection of additional information about Guest users at the step of adding them to your tenant. Additionally, you can add an approval step where any new Guest user request has to go through approval, to ensure they are being added to the correct workspace and are not violating any organizational policies.

Previously, the Guest user request approver would receive a notification letting them know that a new Guest user was requested to be added to a workspace and will show them the details about the Guest (things like their first and last name, the organization they are part of, their job title, etc) as well as the details of which workspace they need to be added to.

In our latest release we’ve completed the full picture of the request by adding a section dedicated to who originally requested the Guest to be added to your tenant.

You can see that along with the information about the Guest, the approver can also see the domain from which the user came as well as the justifications submitted by the requestor.

This single pane of glass allows the approver to make an educated decision on whether to approve or reject the addition of the Guest user to the specific workspace. Zero second guessing!

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