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EasyLife 365 Collaboration now archives SharePoint content into Microsoft 365 Archive through a pluggable connector, and governs the complete SharePoint site-level sharing configuration from the tenant default, the template and the provisioning action alike. It also lets you curate a catalog of guest access profiles that inviters choose from, without ever exposing the security groups behind them.

What’s new?

Microsoft 365 Archive connector

• Archiving is now a pluggable connector chosen per resource type, under Settings → Teams & Groups → Archive settings and Settings → SharePoint sites → Archive settings.
• Teams default is the classic behavior: the Team is archived, its channels become read-only, and its SharePoint content stays on normal storage. It remains the default for Teams and Groups.
• Microsoft 365 Archive moves the SharePoint site itself into cold storage, so it stops consuming your normal storage quota. Where the group also has a Team, the Team is archived first and the site follows.
• Choosing Microsoft 365 Archive makes groups without a Team archivable, adds an Archive column to the Manage lists, offers Archive as an escalation on the SharePoint Expiration and Confirmation rules, and enables a SharePoint archival policy that asks owners to confirm whether an archived site is still required.
• Owners are told that archived content becomes unavailable until reactivation, rather than read-only, and that archiving runs in the background.
• The settings page verifies the two tenant prerequisites — Microsoft 365 Archive turned on, and a pay-as-you-go billing profile — while you choose the connector, instead of letting the first archive fail. See Prepare your tenant for Microsoft 365 Archive.
• See Settings for the connector, and Groups for the Archive column and the archive actions.

SharePoint sharing configuration on the template

• A new Sharing section governs the complete SharePoint site-level sharing configuration: external sharing capability, people-picker guest suggestions, the default sharing link and permission, Anyone-link expiry, domain allow and block lists, whether members can share the site and files, whether they may add people to the site members group, and access requests with their address.
• The same section appears at three layers — a tenant default under Settings → SharePoint sites, a template's Privacy tab, and a SharePoint provisioning action — and they resolve per setting. A template that sets one value inherits the rest rather than replacing the whole default, and the action wins because it runs last.
• Every control offers an unset option that names the value behind it, such as Tenant default settings (Anyone), read live from your tenant's own SharePoint settings.
• Settings the capability in force makes meaningless are turned off with the reason beside them, so a tenant that permits no Anyone links leaves no Anyone-link expiry to set below it.
• When a sensitivity label governs a site, only the sharing capability defers to the label. Domain restrictions, link defaults, sharing permissions and Anyone-link expiry are still applied by EasyLife, and a hint above the capability control names the label — including the tenant default label that reaches every new group.
• Access requests and the three sharing permissions were previously reachable only on a provisioning action. They are now on the template as well, legacy action fields are read into the new section automatically, and the action still overrides where both are set. See Sharing and SharePoint automation step.

Guest access catalogs

• A new Access profile catalogs area under Templates lets you curate named lists of access profiles. A profile is a plain-language title and description that stands for the security groups it grants — the groups themselves are never shown outside Cockpit. See Access Catalog.
• Each catalog decides whether a selection is required, and whether one profile or several may be chosen. Profiles can be Preselected, Locked, or both — locked and preselected together means every guest invited through the template receives that access.
• Attach an active catalog to a guest-creation template from the new Access Catalog section on its Settings tab, and the invitation wizard gains a final Access profiles step. Inviters pick from your titles and descriptions, and can never grant access you have not defined.
• After the invite, the Engine reconciles the guest's group memberships to match the selection, adding and removing only the groups this catalog granted. Role-assignable, dynamic-membership and on-premises-synced groups are always refused, and every submission is re-validated server-side.

Smaller improvements

• Compliance panels now list only the rules that are actually being evaluated. A rule appears when the policy assigned to that resource configures it; an archived resource shows only the archival review; and the section is hidden when there is nothing to draw. A policy that fails to load falls back to the previous behavior rather than hiding a genuine non-compliance. See Compliance panels.
• The creation wizard now opens for every tenant. A tenant whose feature configuration carried no guest management block lost the wizard entirely, for every template type.
• The approval reason is capped at 2,000 characters with a translated validation message, matching the approver comment limit. Typing is not blocked — the message explains the limit instead.
• Templates can now build what they reference. Create in the page header of the Policies tab opens a new policy of the right type for what the template targets, and the Approvals tab offers the same. Edit in the summary table toolbar opens the item currently selected. The template you are editing is kept as a draft throughout. See Templates.
• A newly enabled group Archival rule now starts with sensible defaults: 3 reminders, a 7-day interval, a 90-day trigger, no escalation, and Skip if SharePoint activity is detected switched off. Existing policies are untouched. See Archival.
• The Manage → Groups archive toolbar establishes the recorded archive state before offering a direction. A state EasyLife has not recorded offers a neutral Change archive state instead of defaulting to Archive.
• Audit logging moved onto the same shared writer that EasyLife 365 Identity and Mail now use. Every audit event recorded for Collaboration carries a product field, so a workspace shared across products can be queried and filtered per product without relying on category names alone. Nothing about the events you already see in the Logs section or in your Application Insights/Log Analytics workspace changes. See Audit logging.

How these updates will affect you

• Nothing changes until you choose a connector. Every tenant stays on Teams default for Teams and Groups and on No connector for standalone sites, which is exactly the behavior the product has always had.
• Choosing Microsoft 365 Archive changes what "archived" means: content moves to cold storage and is unavailable to members until the site is reactivated, rather than staying readable. Reactivation is immediate within the first seven days and can take up to 24 hours after that. Tell your owners before you switch.
• The archive read-only switch has been relabelled Teams default archiving: Restrict members to read-only permissions and moved into a new Archive settings section. Its behavior is unchanged, and it applies to the Teams default connector only.
• In an exported configuration file that setting has moved to groupSettings.archiveSettings.teamSettings.shouldSetSpoSiteReadOnlyForMembers. The legacy groupSettings.shouldSetSpoSiteReadOnlyForMembers key is still written and still read, and the value under archiveSettings wins when both are present. This only matters if you diff or hand-edit exported files.
• Your existing template sharing setting is carried over. The old single External Sharing dropdown is read into Who the site can be shared with, and its Tenant default settings value becomes the unset state, which behaves the same way.
• If a sensitivity label governs a site — including through your tenant's default label — the sharing capability you configure is deliberately not applied. That has always been true; the template now says so on the page instead of leaving the difference unexplained.
• Provisioning actions that already configure access requests or the sharing permissions keep their values and still win over the template and the tenant default. Their legacy fields are cleared the next time the action is saved.
• Nothing changes for guest invitations until you build an access catalog and attach it to a guest-creation template. Association is available on templates that create a new guest only — "add existing guest" templates are unaffected.
• Group access granted through a catalog is kept in sync as a guest's profile selection changes, but only for groups that catalog granted. Anything added another way, including the wizard's separate Guest memberships step, is left alone. Additions still respect your tenant's allow adding guests to groups setting; removals are never blocked by it.
• Compliance panels will show fewer rows for resources whose assigned policy configures only part of the rule set, and a single row for archived resources. The frozen values of the other rules are still kept, they are simply no longer listed as rules nobody is measuring.