Last week I saw this helpful tweet from my former Microsoft colleague Ovi Barcelo:
It references a good article (direct link here) of a new feature coming in April 2024 called Restricted SharePoint Search – from the article:
Restricted SharePoint Search gives you time to review and audit site permissions. It is designed to help you maintain momentum with your Copilot deployment while you implement robust data security solutions from Microsoft Purview and manage content lifecycle with SharePoint Advanced Management. Combined, these two solutions offer a complete solution for data discovery, protection, and governance.
Introducing Restricted SharePoint Search to help you get started with Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Community Hub
This seems like a sensible offering from Microsoft as one of the most frequent topics of conversations I’ve had with customers exploring Copilot adoption is concerns around data security and oversharing. I’ve written a few blogs about this already and with this new feature, Microsoft is clearly looking to encourage customers to take the first steps into Copilot usage but with some additional guardrails in place to try specifically exclude SharePoint sites that may have highly sensitive data in them or have not adopted effective file security permissions through Purview.
Organisations should note that SharePoint Restricted Search is off by default which likely makes sense from a Microsoft perspective (maximum datasets for Copilot to search and respond with), however I’d imagine many organisations may have preferred this was turned ON by default to allow a staged rollout with a more cautious approach to AI powered assistance.
Nevertheless, the fact this functionality is being added suggests to me that Microsoft is responding to feedback from customers around data privacy concerns and providing a valuable tool to be able to restrict access to data until all the necessary security permission are in place. When this functionality is turned on, users are given a visual cue that restrictions are in place:
If you to follow the rollout and availability of this feature, keep an eye on it here: Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365
Thanks for sharing Sam. I think this is an important step that should be offered to businesses looking to issue employees with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Thanks Sam, interesting information here 🙂 Good to pick this up in the commercial space!