Big announcements from Microsoft Inspire 2023, pt. 2
This blog post is the second one on the series of Microsoft Inspire 2023 announcements. Like I promised in my previous post, this one covers the M365 Backup and the M365 Archive features.
Since I had a very important meeting with the forest I had to attend to, publishing this post took me some time. Here’s what the meeting was all about:
In Finland, you can just go to the forest and pick up some delicious berries. The forest is the place for me where even I stop thinking about technology and let my mind wander.
But now, to the actual point.
Microsoft 365 Backup
Microsoft is seeing a lot of effort to make M365 cloud secure. Since cybercriminals are trying to get ahead all the time and the number of ransomware encryption attacks is rising, having a backup system within your own tenant makes only sense, especially when the promised to be restorable in hours.
With M365 Backup you can back up & restore all or selected SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes in your tenant. The restoring of files, sites, and emails can be done from a certain point-in-time in a granular manner or at massive scale. The backup and restoring will be done from the Admin center. It’s also good to know that the backed up data will remain within the geographical location as your other data, i.e. if you have your data in Europe, it won’t leave there.
The M365 Backup feature will be available in public preview in Q4/2023. Backing up Teams conversations is on the roadmap for later.
Microsoft 365 Archive
The amount of data within M365 tenants keeps growing by the day, and a huge amounts of data within a tenant isn’t that uncommon anymore. The default storage that comes with SharePoint may not be sufficient anymore, especially when you are producing lot of video and image content or large PowerPoint presentations with lot of media in them. And not all of the data you have is in active use all the time, but you don’t want to delete it either.
Microsoft introduced M365 Archive as a part of Microsoft Syntex offering. Site level archiving be available for public preview in Q4/2023 and file level archiving in second half of 2024. With the archiving feature, SharePoint admins can choose sites to be archived directly from the SP admin center. This will make them to be part of the so called cold storage, which costs less than the hot storage that you are using for your active SharePoint sites. At this point it’s good to remember that all the Teams teams have SharePoint site behind them and all the files in teams will be saved to that site. In case you need to archive SharePoint site related to a team, that should be possible too (Waiting for the documentation about this 🤓).
The archiving feature is useful for information that cannot be deleted for various reasons or for storing historical information about the organisation, e.g. news posted in SharePoint. In modern SharePoint, news are posted from all around the sites, and if you don’t want to archive the whole site, just the news posts, it could be arranged with a work flow or automation that moves the older posts to another archive site that will be archived after certain period of time, like a year. If you are not in a hurry with the archiving, you can wait for the file level archiving feature, since that can be used for archiving pages/news posts (technically, a page is a file in SharePoint world).
In the announcement, Microsoft stated that the archived sites will retain the existing security, compliance, search, and rich metadata features. Microsoft also specified that the admin-level search is included, but apparently they haven’t yet set the details on whether the archived content will be visible for regular users in the M365 search results or not.
Preview available
In case you are interested in signing up for the preview, you can do it for both Backup and Archive here. (https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/syntex/register/?interest=microsoft365ArchivePublicPreview ). The pricing of the features will be revealed when the public preview begins. But as a part of the Microsoft Syntex offering, which has a payg pricing (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-GB/microsoft-365/syntex/syntex-licensing#microsoft-syntex-pay-as-you-go ) nowadays, it’s probably going to be pay-as-you-go model too. Both features will be charged separately.
Here’s all for now, there will be at least a third post about the announcements, as soon as I get enough for now for spending time in the forest. In case you’re interested of hearing more & possibly seeing some demos, join our Astetta edellä webinar in the end of August. It will be in Finnish, but as you might already know, many good things are 😉