Coming soon - New capabilities from Site information panel (Change site icon and delete site)

Microsoft

Hi all - I wanted to share a couple of new features we are enabling on the Site information panel (accessible from the gear menu) that site owners will soon be able to take advantage of:

  • Change the site icon: For group connected sites this will update the icon for the group and reflect in other group workloads
  • Delete site: This will allow site owners to delete site.  For group connected sites, this will trigger the deletion of the group as well.  Owners will be prompted with a confirmation dialog requiring an explicit acknowledgement via checkbox that content will be deleted before proceeding.

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We plan to start rolling this feature out in the next couple of weeks, starting with First Release.

 

As always, questions or comments welcome below!


Thanks,

Tejas

16 Replies
First question anyway to turn off the delete option. Since for compliance and retention, we certainly do not want site just deleted. I am sure many others will feel the same. Especially for group sites, since there is no way to reduce a group owners permission levels from full control.

Second, if someone deletes a site anyway to alert the administrator?

is there a way to restrict this to only allow the person to change the site title / description and prevent deletion?

 

I sure hope that there will be a way to recover Deleted sites and the associated group.


@Dean Gross wrote:

I sure hope that there will be a way to recover Deleted sites and the associated group.


There already is. Unfortunately only through PowerShell at the moment, but it works well: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Restore-a-deleted-Office-365-Group-b7c66b59-657a-4e1a-8aa0-...

 

Still agree with the comments that we should be able to prevent deletion though.

You have only 30 days to recover. After that it is gone and no way of knowing when a group is deleted.

Is there any way of setting up an alert via Security & Compliance or by other means to flag a group/site deletion I'm wondering? Site administration activities and the Deleted group activity alert would that cover it?

 

For after 30 days, is there where customers should invest in 3rd party backups solutions or should Office 365 have more built-in options? 

Plenty of backup solutions out there.
Just something else for customers to think about
Many won't bother with all the redundancy Microsoft has in place.

Though setting alert in the security and compliance centre is something to look into.

@Cian Allner wrote:

Is there any way of setting up an alert via Security & Compliance or by other means to flag a group/site deletion I'm wondering? Site administration activities and the Deleted group activity alert would that cover it?


Yes, you can set up an alert policy for that in the Audit Log Search:

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Hi Tejas-- any chance this information panel will be extensible? We'd love to surface some of our added functionality  for site management through an interface like this rather than having customers visit 2 different UI elements.

Ditto. We have some information we manage about the site through a custom feature we've built in house. Being able to add that to the Site Information panel would be great!

Interesting - are you looking to simply display read-only information?  Tell us more about what/how you'd do.

Hi Tejas-- we have built a system with additional layers of governance for a site. Currently, for classic mode sites, we plop an App part on the page with this functionality, but we would like to move to a more integrated way of showing this info-- especially for modern sites. For example, here is a graphic of our site card. There is a tab that shows ownership info, a tab that shows site metadata, a tab showing policy and automated lifecycle status and a tab for launching additional managed self-service requests for the site...

Policy TabPolicy TabRequest TabRequest TabOwnership TabOwnership TabMetadata TabMetadata Tab

Some of the details we present are read-only, and others can be managed by the Site Owner.

 

Before we create site collections, we have our users fill out a form to indicate details about their site. Some of those attributes are things like a Site Owner (who manages the site), Data Owner (responsible for the content of the site), and a data classification (in alignment w/ confidentiality). We also use some of the data for lifecycle management- having users "renew" their site, or give us authorization to clean up their site when it's no longer in use. 

 

Some of these details are used to provision the site collection through a powershell script and activate features based on their selections (for example, confidential sites may have more auditing features in place), and others are used to help us govern the sites and communicate with the appropriate people, rather than try to guess who to talk to when there are multiple users in an Owners group. From an administrative stand-point it makes our lives much (MUCH) easier.

 

We display site owner information, data classification, and more in a web part we've created so it can help both site visitors with understanding their site or knowing who to talk to, and us when we're troubleshooting or managing it. Site Owners can also come back and use the form to update who owns the site when things change or to request additional features.