Now available: Multi-Geo in SharePoint and Office 365 Groups
Published Sep 27 2018 07:09 AM 94.3K Views
Microsoft

Updated March 27, 2019

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the General Availability of Multi-Geo Capabilities in SharePoint Online and Office 365 Groups. The functionality has been in preview, and thanks to the invaluable feedback from our preview customers, it’s now ready for prime time.

 

Multi-Geo in SharePoint and Groups enables global businesses control the country or region where shared resources like SharePoint Team Sites, Office 365 Groups content (associated SharePoint Sites and Groups mailboxes) are stored at-rest.

 

Earlier this year we launched Multi-Geo in Exchange Online and OneDrive, giving control over the geo-location of user-attached resources like user’s mailbox and OneDrive files.

 

With more data residency measures being legislated around the world for cloud data, global businesses are challenged with meeting their data residency requirements and digitally transforming with the cloud.

 

Multi-Geo addresses these challenges by enabling a single Office 365 tenant to span multiple regions and/or countries and giving customers the flexibility to choose the country or region where each employee’s Office 365 data is stored at-rest. This helps businesses meet their global data residency needs and digitally transform with Office 365.

 

Configuring Multi-Geo in SharePoint

 

 

Setting up and managing Multi-Geo is now available through the SharePoint admin center.  Simply click ‘Add location’ and select the needed satellite geo and then pick a namespace URL. New sites created by users are automatically created in the geo where their PreferredDataLocation (PDL) was established.  See more about managing PDL with Azure AD Connect at aka.ms/PDL

 

Administering Multi-Geo in SharePointAdministering Multi-Geo in SharePoint

 

For your global workforce, the digital transformation means that every employee is empowered with a modern productivity experience in Office 365.

 

Global SharePoint Home experience

With SharePoint Multi-Geo, satellite geos now get the rich SharePoint Online functionalities in addition to the OneDrive functionalities. SharePoint Home experience shows a curated list of News roll-up and Suggested sites powered by the intelligence of the Office graph, which analyzes the activities and signals from across the global organization and tailors a list for every user.

 

SharePoint HomeSharePoint HomeSharePoint Home

New site creation in the user's geo

Team sites and Communications sites creation experience automatically detects the user’s configured geo-location and triggers sites creations in the corresponding geo.

 

New sites automatically created in the user's geoNew sites automatically created in the user's geoNew sites automatically created in the user's geo

Hub site is Multi-Geo aware

SharePoint Hub sites enhances the discovery and engagement with content for employees, while creating a complete and consistent representation of projects, departments or regions. With SharePoint Multi-Geo, sites from Satellite geos can easily be associated with a hub site regardless of which geo the hub site is hosted in. This makes it easy for employees to tailor their business units needs through hubs while at the same time being part of One Enterprise. Employees can search and get results across the hub through a single search experience, regardless of in which geo the sites are located at-rest.

 

SharePoint Hub Site experienceSharePoint Hub Site experienceSharePoint Hub Site experience

 

Mobile

For employees on the go, the same great productivity experience is available on rich mobile apps for SharePoint, OneDrive and Outlook. Employees simply sign in with their Office 365 credentials and access content in their Multi-Geo enabled Office 365 tenant, they don’t need to remember any geo specific URLs or other information.

 

SharePoint Mobile with sites and people from around the worldSharePoint Mobile with sites and people from around the worldSharePoint Mobile with sites and people from around the world

Managed metadata

For organizations that use taxonomy enterprise managed metadata to organize their sites and contents, Multi-Geo enables an easy way to centrally manage metadata in a central location and behind the scene these get replicated to all the satellites and ready to use in satellite sites. This doesn’t require any additional customization.

 

Rollout

Multi-Geo for SharePoint Online and Exchange Online Groups is now rolled out to all Office 365 tenants enabled with the Multi-Geo feature. Please see https://aka.ms/GoMultiGeo for details.

 

Pricing

Multi-Geo in SharePoint Online and Groups is included with the existing Multi-Geo offering. Please see https://aka.ms/GoMultiGeo for further details or contact your Microsoft representative.

 

Resources

 

41 Comments
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How do you prevent cyber squatting of the geo URLs? If I have mycompany.sharepoint.com today and wish to have mycompanyEUR.onmicrosoft, mycompanyAUS.onmicrosoft etc what is to stop someone going and claiming lots of well known company tenant names with the geo letters on the end via demo O365 subs?

Iron Contributor

@samsearth One of the slide decks from Ignite last week explicitly says that Multi-Geo is not for GDPR Compliance (BRK3376, slide 7). I understand that being compliant with GDPR is a non-trivial task, so perhaps you are signaling that merely moving to Multi-Geo won't buy you GDPR Compliance. Is that why you state that? Are there other reasons at play too?

Microsoft

@Deleted Regarding your question - customers can choose any url that is available in the service for their tenant. We recommend that customers have several options in mind when they choose their satellite locations, for instance MyCompanyEU, MyCompanyEUR, My CompanyEUROPE etc. 

Microsoft

Hi @Michael Sampson - That's right, GDPR does not mandate data residency requirements, so I wanted to be clear with customers that Multi-Geo isn't  required for fulfilling GDPR commitments. However, despite that we see global companies adopt Multi-Geo because it is an easy way to meet their global data residency requirements and satisfy regulators.

Iron Contributor

@samsearth Thanks for the answer. So whereas India's new Personal Data Protection Bill specifically mandates data residency in India (a copy for some data, and absolute localisation for "critical" personal data - the term "critical" being undefined in the legislation), Microsoft's view is that GDPR could be interpreted either way - that data residency in country / in region is required, or that data residency is not required in country / in region? e.g.,
- Recital 81 - the last line makes the assumption the processor is in the Union or a Member State, and therefore assumes data processing would happen in region.
- Recital 101 - talks about "flows of personal data on and from countries outside the Union" ... if data is not stored in the Union, do you view that as not being a flow? Or that Microsoft has sufficient safeguards in place to enable "full compliance"? (e.g., as outlined in Recital 108)

 

I interpret your point about companies still embracing Multi-Geo to help with GDPR in this way: GDPR doesn't mandate in region processing explicitly, but if processing is done in region, then it reduces the compliance efforts required by the company in putting in place organisational and technical measures to safeguard processing activities. Is that what you mean?

Iron Contributor

 @samsearth I noticed your update on https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Security-Privacy-and-Compliance/Introducing-Multi-Geo-in-Offi... too - that the minimum Office 365 seats in a tenant is now 2,500 (down from 5,000 in April), and that a minimum of 5% (125 seats) of these seats have to be licensed for Multi-Geo. Thanks for the update on that.

Iron Contributor

@Adriana Wood To Mark's question, since you can't prevent cyber-squatting, why did Microsoft choose the name space approach it did, as opposed to standardised sub domains, e.g., eur.tenant, aus.tenant, etc.?

Copper Contributor

Can you provide any insight on what impact this will have to Hybrid connectivity?

If I understand correctly each Data Location will have its own index, will each data location offer the ability to connect to an on prem farm or will the only search connection be available to the default location?

Microsoft

@Hal at Work -- For Cloud Hybrid Search your index from on-premises will live in the central (default) location. The reason for this is that the design of Cloud Hybrid search supports a single index connection for the tenant. Please file a DCR request with your scenario, we would like to understand more about it. 

Microsoft

Regarding the namespace -- We do not choose it. We allow customers to choose their own namespace (amongst available namespaces) for greater flexibility. There are instances where the customer branding or desired URLs are different in different countries. 

Microsoft

@Michael Sampson - sorry for the delayed response, unfortunately the answer probably won’t be very satisfying, because the answer to a question like this is that the customer needs to get their own legal advice around data residency requirements for any law, GDPR included. 

Brass Contributor

We are very small firm like 500 employees in US. We have just setup our small office outside of the US in Canada with 5 employees. Because of the GDPR, we setup cloud for them on different tenants. Now we are puzzled as how to make them feel like part of us and seamless access to all our apps ( Yammer, SharePoint, etc) and data. First I was happy to know Multi-Geo could be the answer but the minimum office seat limit for 2500 is not helping us. Could anyone suggest any other way to accomplish?

 

Thanks & Regards,

Microsoft

Hi @Khushi Shaikh - thanks for reaching out. We are exploring reducing the seat limits further by summer 2019, so this may not be an issue after all. In the meantime, have you explored cross-tenant collaboration scenarios? Please see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/office-365-inter-tenant-collaboration. Thanks!

Brass Contributor

Hello @samsearth - Any idea of the seat limits in Summer 2019? Do you think wait would help small organizations like us. Well, I did setup the B2B Azure Portal. Not able to add Yammer App to the portal.

 

I was not aware of the resource you shared. Thanks for the helpful link. 

 

Best Regards,

Copper Contributor

@samsearth thank you for the info.  Is multi-geo now available for SharePoint?

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@samsearth  The post mentions the "Office Graph". I thought this was discontinued long ago? (Like described here: https://www.techmikael.com/2017/05/the-office-graph-is-dead-long-live.html). Or was it just the APIs and the "Office Graph" is still alive? I'm asking to get the language straight when talking about the technology around Office 365.

Edit: Ok the answer is here.

Copper Contributor

Is it possible to migrate an existing site to a new/different geo location?

Copper Contributor

Thinking Sharepoint an Onedirve.   Is it possible to make a Satellite Location  GEO become the Central Location Geo?

 

For example a  satellite location  geo now becomes the central location geo  (and then the original central location geo can then either be removed, or becomes a satellite location) .  

Microsoft

Is there currently a way to view who created/deleted a new geo location? This does not seem to be an option in the audit logs as far as I have seen.

Brass Contributor

We'd love for this to be available for CSP's too. Looking forward to announcements hopefully at Inspire @samsearth?

Microsoft

@James Fields  - yes, please see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/move-sharepoint-between-geo-locations

 

 

@stewartgscott - No, a satellite geo cannot be changed to become the central geo.

 

@Fokalyva - that's right, I don't see it either :) I am checking with the engineering team.

 

@Bruce Laing - Totally, Bruce. We're working on expanding the service beyond Microsoft's enterprise customers.

 

 

 

Copper Contributor

@samsearth  

Hi Sameer,

We are planning to enable MultiGeo  for Onedrive. Also we are aware OneDrive comes along with SharePoint. However we don’t want to change anything in SPO world. Hence is there anyway to enable MultiGeo only for OneDrive.

Microsoft

@Ganesh_Prabu 

Is this type of deployment something you want to do long term? Or rather as an initial stage? By default when you add a new geo today it will have both SPO and ODB enabled. However, if you momentarily need to operate on ODB only mode, we  can have support set your geo into ODB mode for a period of time. This can be done via support ticket.

 
Copper Contributor

@Adriana Wood  Thanks for your quick response. 

For now we do not have plan to setup MultiGeo for SharePoint and Exchange. To answer your question yes it is for our long term need. May be on the run and adaptability of the users we will enable SP and Exchange in future.

 

Could you let me know, If I raise support ticket, how long we can have Multigeo only for OD?

 

Copper Contributor

@samsearth 

 

@Ganesh_Prabu 

 

HI Guys, we have just enabled the Multi-Geo license for SharePoint & OneDrive in our tenant. Our Central Geo is in Asia Pacific. 

 

We want to understand the process for creating Satellite GEO for Australia location. We already have PDL attributed set for all users as their Mailboxes are using Multi-Geo. 

 

  1. Is the Geo Location added per workload or is it the same for both SPO & OneDrive? i.e I create AUS Location for SPO, do i also create the -my for OneDrive or will it auto-create?
  2. When we create a Satelite tenant in Admin Centre - what happens to the users who have access to sites on Central Geo? DO they lose access/ What about access on their mobile devices? 
  3. Are SharePoint Site discoverable across Geos? Can i search for a site from AU SharePoint Home for a Site on Centrla GEO? 
  4. When we configure Geo Location for One Drive, most users in Australia current have OneDrive in Central Location.  Will Users OneDrive still work if they dont have a OneDrive on Satellite GEO but only on Central GEO? Will their Mobile Apps still work if the PDL says AUS?  Can we use "Move a SharePoint Site to Different GEO Location" for OneDrive? 
  5. We ideally want to have point-in-time where all new sites are created in AU & gradually move existing sites using the Move a SharePont Site to different GEO location.  

Thanks in advanced !

Microsoft

Hi Con,

 

Please see in line:

Is the Geo Location added per workload or is it the same for both SPO & OneDrive? i.e I create AUS Location for SPO, do i also create the -my for OneDrive or will it auto-create?

 

When we create a Satelite tenant in Admin Centre - what happens to the users who have access to sites on Central Geo? DO they lose access/ What about access on their mobile devices? 

 

  • No, users do not loose access to anything they have, so long as they have permissions to access files, they can access those files regardless of where the user is.

Are SharePoint Site discoverable across Geos? Can i search for a site from AU SharePoint Home for a Site on Centrla GEO?

 

 

When we configure Geo Location for One Drive, most users in Australia current have OneDrive in Central Location.  Will Users OneDrive still work if they dont have a OneDrive on Satellite GEO but only on Central GEO? Will their Mobile Apps still work if the PDL says AUS?  Can we use "Move a SharePoint Site to Different GEO Location" for OneDrive? 

 

We ideally want to have point-in-time where all new sites are created in AU & gradually move existing sites using the Move a SharePont Site to different GEO location.  

 

 

I hope this helps! Please feel free to connect with your technical account manager if you have additional more detailed questions.

 

Also, here is a good video that gives you visual input on the tech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAyrfN5RvQY

 

Thanks

Adriana

Copper Contributor

Thank you so much for the detailed response @Adriana Wood 

Brass Contributor

is multi-geo available for an educational subscription using an a3 license?

Brass Contributor

@samsearth @Khushi Shaikh heard some great news from Louise Urich @LicensingSchool that the requirement for 2,500 seats has been reduced to just 500. Still no news about this coming to CSP yet though?

 

https://www.licensingschool.co.uk/licensing-blog/2019/06/05/multi-geo-capabilities/

Deleted
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How does the multi-geo licensing work for SharePoint sites? If I have a user in the default/home Geo accessing a site in a satellite geo, do they need a multi-geo license?

Brass Contributor

@Deleted No, if the end user is homed in the default/ home Geo they should not need a Multi-Geo licence, only those that you want to set a Preferred Data Location (PDL). The default / home user will still be able to search across Geo-separate SharePoint sites and access the data as their permissions allow.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/multi-geo-tenant-configuration#add-the-multi-geo-capabilities-in-office-365-plan-to-your-tenant

 

Note that the Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365 plan is a user-level service plan. You need a license for each user that you want to host in a satellite location. You can add more licenses over time as you add users in satellite locations.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/multi-geo-user-experience#search

Copper Contributor

@samsearth When we add a new satellite geo in SPO, will all the site collection and content in the central geo clone to the satellite geo? or the new satellite geo is going to be a empty site.

Microsoft

@Ganesh_Prabu -- No, we do not clone content across geo locations. Multi-Geo is about data residency. You determine what content you want to have in each geo. Users with permissions to the content regardless of their geo, can see the content thus there is no need to clone it. 

Brass Contributor

any takers for my question? is multi-geo available for an educational subscription using an a3 license?

Microsoft

Hi Paul,

 

Not for EDU at the moment. But please open a request with support with your scenario, could be something we consider down the line.

 

Multi-Geo is its own SKU on top of any other licensing you have. 

 

Copper Contributor

@Adriana Wood Thanks!

 

So lets take I have my SP URL as https://test.sharepoint.com and have 4 different SC with some organisations wide custom applications. And now we enabled MultiGeo to our tenant and added new satellite geo (EUR) location. Now we have EUR URL as https://testEUR.sharepoint.com. The question  is will all the SC (4 SC) and the custom application under the main site will be copied to EUR ? If it is not copied then do we need to move or copy the sites manually? Please clarify us. 

 

From the reply, I understood that It will give us the new EUR site URL (empty geo site), from that we have to copy/move the SC/application based on needs. Is my understanding correct?

Copper Contributor

I understand that Multi-Geo is not about performance but about data residency. 

 

I also understand that If you had an intranet on SharePoint, it would live in a specific Geo, based on the PDL of the user who created the site.

 

I am interested in how co-authoring would work in Multi-Geo, given that there is inevitably added latency for users in opposite continents/Geo compared to where the Intranet/data is.

 

The same would apply to co-authoring in OneDrive: the shared file would be in the user's PDL, with users from other Geos co-authoring.

 

Copper Contributor

Hi, are there plans for more Geos; Brasil and South Africa specifically?

Thanks,

Tom

Copper Contributor

Hi @samsearth are there any ISV programs which entitles a Multi-Geo developer tenant since we are blocked by some technical issues faced at 200K user customer and have no environment to proper troubleshoot it in.

 

Both customer and us have open support tickets but there seems like ISVs has been forgotten in this great offering or do you know anything?

Copper Contributor

@Sameer Sitaram - This is very nice and a great article. Thanks. 

Is it possible to partition my O365 tenant into sub-organizations/subsidiaries - similar to Multi-Geo, but without being fragmented per Geo. (e.g. having multiple subsidiaries within the same Geo, yet with their own URL and their own distinct and visible location)?

Thanks

Brass Contributor

My PDL is NAM and created in Team site in EUR geolocation without group. Now I'm unable to associate a new office 365 group with the existing team site. System says that my preferred data location and site was not in same location . As a global admin, how can i overcome the issue?

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