Innovation in the cloud drives tremendous business value, and it delivers new capabilities to the IT professionals who work tirelessly to support, configure, administer, and secure their organizations’ content and services. Office 365 empowers you to support sophisticated requirements for security and compliance, to manage day-to-day operations, and to maximize the value of Office 365 to people in your organization. We’ve built Office 365 with global scale, exceptional reliability, and support for compliance across industries and geographies on top of intelligent security that keeps your service and content protected and private, we give you granular and dynamic controls so that you can manage access and distribution of your organization’s sensitive information. We’ve equipped you with detailed activity and usage reports. And we’ve brought the innovations born in Office 365 to SharePoint Server 2019? with out-of-the-box capabilities and connected, hybrid experiences. Today at Microsoft Ignite 2018 we announced many of the new capabilities that are available now and coming soon to Office 365 and while our list of news is too big for a single blog, here you’ll find a summary of these announcements.

SharePoint site classification labels

Across your organization, you probably have different types of content that require different security requirements to comply with industry regulations and internal policies. Using Microsoft Information protection labels you can now apply consistent security and access policies to SharePoint Sites based on the sensitivity of the site. You can create sensitivity labels and associate them with policies in the new Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center. You can then apply these labels to files, emails, groups, Sites and Teams to automatically enforce consistent policies across your content.

Automation application of retention labels

Data is your company’s most important asset, with the automatic application of retention labels you can ensure your most important assets are compliant to meet your corporate or regulatory requirements.  These retention labels can be created by importing the content types that you already use in SharePoint to help streamline the application of retention policies across all your content in SharePoint. Learn more about unified labeling management in the Security and Compliance Center at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Announcing-the-availability-of-unified-labeling-management-in/ba-p/262492.

Label analytics

Information is growing at exponential rates and we’re making it easier for you to stay informed on how retention and sensitivity labels are being used to classify, retain, and protect your organization’s content in the cloud. Using label analytics you can now get insights into how content is being labeled, including which labels are used most, and what emails and files they’re being applied to and also explore user activity to identify who’s been applying labels, investigate unusual trends, and more. Learn more about unified labeling, analytics, file plan and more at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Updates-to-Advanced-Data-Governance-Unified-labeling-analytics/ba-p/261876.

Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams

Data loss is non-negotiable, today we announced Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. Files Restore is now available for SharePoint document libraries, protecting your shared files in SharePoint, Teams, Outlook groups, and Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups and uses the same recovery capabilities that protect your personal files in OneDrive for Business. Files Restore is a complete self-service recovery solution that allows site administrators restore document libraries from any point in time during the last 30 days and rewind changes using activity data to find the exact moment to revert to.

SharePoint admin center updates

While our new user experiences are designed to be simpler, more intuitive, and more powerful we also believe administration should be just as simple, just as intuitive, and just as powerful. To that aim, we’re adding new controls and capabilities SharePoint Admin center to include:

• The ability to manage all sites, including group connected team sites, communication sites, and hub sites
• Controls such as Device Access and Sharing Policies through a richer menu to manage and control how information is accessed and shared.
• A new command surface that provides an actionable command bar, hub site and classification management control
• Enhancements to the site creation experience empowering admins with more settings and control such as storage and classification
• Several new options in the settings page including ability to control the defaults for user created sites
• A new simple way to track and manage tenant level storage and site level storage limits

In addition to these new capabilities, you’ll soon be able to also change site URLs and manage site creation settings.

Multi-geo capabilities for SharePoint

Multi-geo capabilities with SharePoint support your global data residency needs by storing SharePoint data in more than one selected Office 365 data center regions or countries. Microsoft commits to provide in-geo data residency, business continuity and disaster recovery for your core customer data at rest. With multi-geo capabilities for SharePoint you can have a single Office 365 tenant that can span across multiple geos and enable a unified communication and collaboration experience across your global organization. You can migrate various on-premises satellites data silos into a single Office 365 tenant and at the same time meet your data residency needs. Your users are now connected to the people and content that matter most, regardless of where they work. For IT, you can use powerful Office 365 admin tools to easily create and manage satellite sites and if needed move user data between geos to meet your data residency business needs. Get reports on where each user’s data is stored and audit trail of activities of all users in your global enterprise. Tailor sharing, security, and compliance policies separately for each geo—all from a familiar admin experience. To learn more about Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365 see https://products.office.com/en-us/business/multi-geo-capabilities.

External sharing integration with Azure AD B2B

Last year at Ignite we introduced a new external sharing experience where recipients could access the shared content in a secure way by entering a one-time passcode sent to their email address without the need of creating or remembering passwords. This year, we’re taking it a step further by integrating the one-time passcode sign-in experience with the Azure AD B2B platform. This enables external users to exist in your Azure AD directory as Guests which can be managed in the way you are already familiar with. This integration also brings the one-time passcode experience when sharing SharePoint sites and lists with external user.

SharePoint Migration Tool Improvements

In addition to these capabilities to help streamline your journey to Office 365 we announced several new capabilities we’re bringing to the SharePoint Migration Tool. The SharePoint Migration Toolis designed to simplify your journey to the cloud through a free, simple, and fast solution to migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365.  The SharePoint Migration Tool allows you to accelerate your journey to Office 365 overcoming obstacles typically associated with migration projects. With the SharePoint Migration Tool you can evaluate, address, and migrate the information that matters the most to your organization, the libraries, lists, and now complete **SharePoint 2013 sites **that form the foundation of the SharePoint experience.  Using the SharePoint Migration Tool you can start your migration today and take advantage of the full suite of features and security capabilitiesthat Office 365 offers. In addition to adding support for full site migrations with the SharePoint Migration Tool, we’re also refreshing the user experience and have made generally available its Windows PowerShell cmdlets to support automating your migration to Office 365. Learn more about how we secure your data with SharePoint and OneDrive in Office 365 and how customers are achieving success at https://aka.ms/SharePoint-Security. Thank you again for your support of SharePoint and OneDrive. We look forward to your continued feedback on UserVoice and hope to connect with you at Ignite or another upcoming Microsoft or community led event.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q:  When will SharePoint site classification labels be available? A: SharePoint site classification labels will begin rolling out to Targeted Release in December 2018. Q:  When will Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams be available? A: Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams will begin rolling out to Targeted Release in December 2018. Q:  When will the updates to the SharePoint admin center begin rolling out? A: These updates will begin to become available in Q1CY2019. Q:  When will content type to label support be available? A: Content type to label support will be available in November 2018.