Now available: Multi-Geo in SharePoint and Office 365 Groups

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

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.

News from Sites.png SharePoint 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 Site Creation.png New 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.

Hub Site.png SharePoint 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 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.

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