One of the great things about Office 365 is the new and improved features that are being continuously added. Microsoft has a very aggressive roadmap when it comes to Office 365 changes.
Just to emphasize this point there are currently (5 July 2020) 783 updates in various stages of deployment.
While this is generally good from a ROI and end user perspective, it can be major challenge.
Especially if your organisation adheres to certain compliance and security policies and processes
Challenges of Office 365 Changes
Office 365 provides a number of global policies that allow us to set some level of business process rules across our tenant. However these policies such as Data Loss Prevention do not extend to all applications in the tenant.
Additionally Office 365 changes to the applications may bypass or render your well intended policies defunct.
To illustrate this, lets look at one of the updates to OneDrive that is currently being rolled out.
Feature ID: 62665 from the myriad of latest Office 365 updates states the following:
“Allow user to override locked file to delete – Users are unable to delete a document because if they had it opened in another tab on a different computer, or because someone else had it open and forgot about it, effectively locking the document. This feature allows you to override that lock and delete a WXP file when someone (or yourself) has it open, whether intentionally or not.”
This update my be a good addition for users who want a quick fix to poor practices.
However, it goes against good practices policies, validation policies and compliance policies.
Solution
The simple solution is an inconvenient one which means you have to impact each update against your security and compliance needs.
Given that there are 783 updates in the latest tranche of the Microsoft roadmap this is not really practical for any organisation.
Office 365 Changes – How we can help
We specialise in managing and maintaining Office 365 tenants from a governance, security and compliance perspective.
Particularly for those organisations who work in regulated industries such as Pharma, Biotec, Healthcare, Nuclear and Finance.
We offer a simple solution where we will impact the constant changes in the Microsoft roadmap for you.
Rather than offering a generic service we actually map out your individual organisational requirements. We use this to baseline your specific needs against the Microsoft roadmap.
This baseline also includes a full Office 365 health check to ensure you are impacted properly for the future but that your current environment is complaint from the start.
What’s included?
- An assessment of your security, compliance and governance needs.
- A full Office 365 health check baseline report including any recommendations from the initial assessment.
- A monthly impact assessment of Microsoft updates against your baseline
- A monthly recommendations report on which updates you should adopt or reject
If you think your organisation would benefit from our maintenance service then please do reach out to us.