News

Microsoft Uniting OneDrive and SharePoint Admin Portals Next Month

• By Kurt Mackie
• 01/26/2021

A bunch of Microsoft 365 news bits were announced this week.

Of interest to IT pros, Microsoft is converging its OneDrive and SharePoint Admin Center management portals, with a consolidated portal expected to arrive for Microsoft 365 subscribers "through February," per a Tuesday Microsoft announcement.

Microsoft has plenty of management portals, so much so that there's an MS Portals project in existence, set up by Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Adam Fowler, that's dedicated to tracking them. Microsoft is consolidating its OneDrive and SharePoint management portals to "enable a smoother admin experience across the Microsoft 365 admin suite," and to give IT pros "increased centralized control over content across the organization," the announcement explained.

The new combined portal, which wasn't named, will provide controls over the following OneDrive aspects:

• Internal and external sharing by end users
• Access controls for end users
• Default storage limits for end users
• Information retention policies
• Sync controls

IT pros will have access to OneDrive "cards," as well as SharePoint cards, which show statistical details on things like app use and file activity, including end user content sharing. It's possible to block the uploading of specific file types, if wanted. IT pros also can adjust the default storage limits for end users. They can set retention times on content, both for OneDrive and SharePoint, which might be done after an employee leaves.

Content uploads also can be blocked "based on device or network location" as a security precaution.

Also coming with the portal change will be a Global Reader role, which permits a person to view, but not change, Microsoft 365 administrative settings.

Adaptive Cards Compliance Controls in Teams
Microsoft also this week announced the ability to use the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center portal to set compliance controls over the use of Adaptive Cards in the Microsoft Teams collaboration service for both files and chat content.

Adaptive Cards are a "platform-agnostic" Power Automate capability for sharing information, which uses the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format, per Microsoft's description. They are used to share information "between Microsoft Teams and other services."

The new compliance controls in the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center portal will permit IT pros set the following protections:

• Legal hold: Preserve Adaptive Card content
• eDiscovery: Identify, collect and produce card content in response to an investigation
• Audit: Audit user activity on Adaptive Cards for forensics
• Retention: Manage card content lifecycle in Teams

Those capabilities are all now at the "general availability" commercial-release stage, the announcement indicated.

Apparently, accessing the capabilities listed above won't require IT pro or developer actions.

"There is no additional work required from app developers to enable them," the announcement indicated. "For the tenant admins, selecting Teams as a location in the above compliance workflows will now automatically include card content generated through apps in the corresponding Teams conversations."

Channel Update Options for Office 365 End Users
Microsoft is planning to include an option that will let IT pros permit Office 365 end users to select the Office 365 feature update "channel" they want, should IT pros want to do such a thing.

This capability, which will appear as an "update to the Office 365 ADMX templates," is briefly noted in this Microsoft 365 roadmap item. The feature is currently under development but planned for a release next month.

Microsoft Lists Adoption Page
Microsoft has created a one-stop landing page to get best-practices advice, guides and templates for end users of the Microsoft Lists list-creation service. The Microsoft Lists Adoption page appears to have been launched this week, per a Microsoft announcement.

Also this week, Microsoft published some advice for customizing rules that get used in Microsoft Lists templates, which can be found in this announcement.