We talk a lot about policies, but what are they? Policies are the management guidelines you put in place to make sure your Microsoft environment remains secure and organized. ShareGate gives you 4 policies to help achieve that goal.

To set up and automate your policies, select Policies from the ShareGate Protect sidebar.

With the Inactivity detection policy, you can set a threshold for the amount of time a team or group can be inactive before action needs to be taken.

If a team or group has been inactive for longer than the set time period you set, a ShareGate Teams chatbot notification or email is automatically sent to the owner. From the notification, the owner can choose to keep, delete, or archive* their inactive team or group.

*The option to archive a team or group is only available if you have set up an Azure storage account to store your data. You can still use the Inactivity detection policy if you don't want to archive content. The notifications will give owners the options: keep or delete.

Purpose tags give you visibility on the business purpose of teams and groups in your environment and help you to assign the right governance policies.

Create purpose tags that are suited to the types of work being done in your organization. Then, you can apply purpose tags to teams and groups yourself or use ShareGate to collaborate with owners automatically--so they can select the purpose tag they feel best represents their teams and groups.

Plus! Set up a custom inactivity detection threshold for each purpose tag to make sure that owners take action on inactivity within a time frame that makes sense for the business purpose of their teams and groups.

The External sharing review policy lets you decide how often team and group owners review external sharing links and guest access.

ShareGate will automatically send a Teams chatbot notification or email to owners when it's time for them to review external sharing links and guests present in their teams and groups. From the notification, owners can decide to remove any external sharing links that are no longer needed and guests who no longer require access.

Sensitivity tags give you visibility on the data sensitivity of teams and groups in your environment and help you apply the best security settings.

Create sensitivity tags that are suited to the types of information in your organization. Then, apply sensitivity tags to teams and groups yourself or use ShareGate to collaborate with owners automatically--so they can select the sensitivity they feel best represents their teams and groups.

Plus! Set up a custom external sharing review for each sensitivity tag to make sure that owners review external sharing links and guests on a schedule that makes sense for the data sensitivity of their teams and groups.

For every policy, ShareGate gives you the ability to delegate tasks to owners. Let owners decide what to do with inactive teams, automate external sharing reviews so owners can monitor guests and sharing links on a schedule, and automatically ask owners to apply tags when they create new teams and groups.

With all this automation, there's less work for you, but team and group owners have more responsibility. So how do you make sure that they know how to perform an external sharing review? Or what it means to archive a team? Don't worry, we've got that covered, too.

Our help center has an entire category dedicated to articles that you can share with team and group owners. We've created these resources to empower owners and guide them in taking action with ShareGate.

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