Nikki Chapple

How to keep up to date with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Posted on 29 October 2023Updated on 11 August 2024by Nikki Chapple

Staying up-to-date on the latest developments on Microsoft 365 Copilot is vital in today’s fast-paced world. However, keeping track of all the updates and changes can be time-consuming. But don’t worry! This blog will explain how to use Power Power Automate to send your personalized Microsoft 365 Copilot RSS news feed to a Microsoft ToDo list (or any location). Once set up, you will receive updates as soon as new content is published without spending endless hours searching for them. With this approach, you will always be up-to-date with the latest Microsoft 365 Copilot news and information, and you can say goodbye to the hassle of manually tracking updates.

This blog is your ultimate guide to staying ahead of the game, ensuring you never miss any crucial updates. Using Power Automate and RSS feeds, you can automatically add new and updated content to your To-Do list and be the first to know about any critical information. With this simple yet effective approach, you can stay in control and stay ahead of the curve.

Microsoft 365 Retention Archive and Backup Strategies Explained

Posted on 11 September 2023Updated on 9 March 2025by Nikki Chapple

Are you unsure about how to manage your Microsoft 365 data retention, archiving, and backup? In this guide, we’ll break down these crucial data management strategies to help you protect your data, ensure compliance, and optimize your storage in Microsoft 365. By the end of this article, you’ll understand the key differences between these strategies and how to apply them effectively.

How to add sensitivity labels to your existing Microsoft 365 Groups, Teams and SharePoint sites

Posted on 23 April 2023Updated on 11 August 2024by Nikki Chapple

How to add sensitivity labels to my existing groups, teams and sites? This was a question I was asked after one of my previous blogs on how to protect your groups, Teams and sites. If you only have a small number of groups, teams and sites, then it is easy to manually add the container sensitivity label to each group team or site. But what happens when you have thousands of groups, couples and sites?

Fortunately, there is a way to automate this task using PnP PowerShell. In this blog post, I will walk you through the steps needed first to analyze your existing groups, teams and site and then to programmatically apply container sensitivity labels to your existing Teams, Groups, and Sites in Microsoft 365 to help you protect your important data from unauthorized access and accidental sharing.

How to use Microsoft 365 Retention Policies and Labels

Posted on 29 January 2023Updated on 9 August 2023by Nikki Chapple

Are you struggling to stay compliant with industry regulations and company policies when it comes to managing your organization’s data? Look no further, because Microsoft 365 retention can help you stay compliant and secure. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management provides powerful tools to enable you to automatically retain or delete content based on your retention schedules.

In this blog, I will walk you through the basics of setting up retention policies and labels in Microsoft 365, so you can start meeting regulatory requirements and protecting your organisation’s sensitive information.

How to use sensitivity labels with your PDF files

Posted on 18 December 2022Updated on 22 December 2022by Nikki Chapple

Did you know you can now label your PDF files with the same sensitivity labels you use with your Word, PowerPoint and Excel files?

Using Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, you can add a visible classification label, protect your PDF files with encryption and add visible marking such as headers, footers and watermarks. Your PDF file now respects any Data loss Prevention policies, such as blocking external sharing of confidential data.

How to allow auto-forwarding to Teams channels

Posted on 31 October 2022Updated on 1 November 2022by Nikki Chapple

Email forwarding can be useful, but poses a security risk due to the potential disclosure of information. Therefore the Anti-spam outbound policy blocks the auto-forwarding at the tenant level by default. Although this minimises the security risks, it hampers productivity since there are valid reasons to allow auto-forwarding to an external domain.

There are valid use cases for external email forwarding such as:

To support the adoption of Microsoft Teams and the concept of working in Teams rather than sending email. However, users cannot auto-forward emails to a Teams channel, because the Teams channel email addresses are external email addresses, for example (uniqueid@emea.teams.ms or uniqueid@uk.teams.ms).
Auto-forwarding emails to a third-party system, such as CRM or ticketing system for processing.

Read on to learn how to allow auto-forwarding to Teams channels and other authorised external domains to increase productivity and reduce security risks.

How to use sensitivity labels to control access to Microsoft Teams, Groups and Sites

Posted on 25 October 2022Updated on 17 January 2024by Nikki Chapple

Are you using Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels to control access to Microsoft Teams, Groups and Sites? If not, why not?

Did you know that your Guest access and external sharing controls are managed at the tenant level? As a result, security becomes ‘one size fits all’ rather than providing granular security controls based on Teams, Groups, and Sites’ confidentiality requirements.

For example

When guest access is enabled, Team owners can add external guests to all Microsoft Teams, Groups and SharePoint sites.
When you create a new Team or a Group, the default SharePoint external sharing is set to New and existing guests unless your tenant setting is more restrictive. So Team members can share Team content externally.

Check out the information below to learn how you can use sensitivity labels to apply granular security controls to Teams, Groups, and Sites.

How to manage Microsoft 365 evergreen change with Power Automate

Posted on 25 September 2022Updated on 11 August 2024by Nikki Chapple

Are you effectively managing your Microsoft 365 evergreen change?

The pace of change in Microsoft 365 is rapid as Microsoft constantly delivers new features, updates to enhance customer value and ways to secure the environment better. We all know it is essential to keep on top of this constant flow of changes, but keeping track of the evergreen changes across the multiple different Microsoft 365 services can be challenging.

Microsoft post all change messages in the Microsoft 365 Message Center. However, the Message Center is not a workflow tool, so triaging and tracking the changes is difficult. In addition, people spend too much time manually copying content from Message Center to other applications and notifying stakeholders rather than assessing the change itself!

So how do you remove this manual overhead and automate your Microsoft 365 evergreen change process?

Read on for top tips and guidance on how to sync your Microsoft 365 messages to a Planner board, and then use Power Automate to automate and customise your process. My Power Automate Flow removes those repetitive tasks, giving you more time to focus on the triaging.

How Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager supports your compliance journey

Posted on 27 August 2022Updated on 10 November 2022by Nikki Chapple

We are in the middle of a digital revolution where information is a strategic asset, hybrid working is the norm and protecting your information assets is crucial to maintaining trust and meeting compliance requirements. As a result, organisations are now seeking external certifications such as ISO27001, Cyber Essentials or NIST 800-53 to manage compliance risks and to provide assurance of their overall information security and compliance posture.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager is a great solution to demystify the complexities of compliance by offering templates, improvements actions and risk-based reporting.

Using Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, I was able to suggest best practices for our Microsoft 365 environment to help CloudWay achieve ISO27001 certification. Read CloudWay’s blog on becoming an ISO 27001 certified company.

Read on to see how Compliance Manager can support your compliance journey.

Do you know you can now upload your improvements actions into the Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Posted on 11 August 2022Updated on 11 August 2024by Nikki Chapple

📢It’s good news for Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager.

You can now bulk import your updated improvement actions directly into Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager using the Improvement actions export report. With no APIs or programmatic interfaces, bulk import is a significant improvement.

Having the ability to work on your improvement actions outside of the Microsoft Purview Admin Center is extremely helpful. You can work on the improvement actions with multiple businesses and IT stakeholders without giving them admin rights. In the past, any changes to improvement actions had to be manually updated in Compliance Manager. Organisations often only focus on the initial export of data, so they miss out on automatic testing notifications, reporting and updates.

By using the Excel export file to bulk upload your changes into Compliance Manager, there is no need to rekey any information, which is a significant time-saving improvement.

Additionally, keeping the Compliance Manager updated lets you see the impact of changes to regulations or configuration changes via automated testing.

Read on to find out more.