Microsoft just announced a service that will make it easier to manage storage for SharePoint Online within the Office 365 suite.

The move effectively tackles one of the big problems users were having with storage allocation to SharePoint site collections. It also makes the management of entire SharePoint environments easier.

The changes announced last night makes the storage limits associated with each group of sites more flexible. It means storage that is not used with one site collection can be moved to another to facilitate the development of that collection.

Freeing-Up Storage

Site collections are groups of related SharePoint websites that, until now, were assigned a set amount of storage space that could not be used for anything else even if the site collection did not use all that space.

Mark Kashman, senior product manager on the SharePoint marketing team, with Microsoft said in a blog post that from here on in, if an administrator sets a storage quota of 100 GB for a site collection and only uses 20 GB, under the old system the 80 GB remaining was wasted.

Under the new system, the 80 GB is returned to the storage pool meaning that site collections no longer "reserve" storage, and that they only use the storage they actually need.

As Needed

The process of assigning storage can also be automated with a tab that enables either manual, or automatic, of storage. The automatic setting increases storage requirements for site collections as needed, drawing on what's available from the pooled storage for the entire Office 365 domain.

The final change that Microsoft has introduced is that the number of site collections SharePoint Online supports per tenant has been increased from 10,000 to 500,000 with the total storage now allowed starting at 10 GB+ 500 MB for every user. This is separate from the default per-uses OneDrive for Business storage space.

The new storage limits will be available for most of the Office 365 plans including Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, and E4; Office 365 Education A2, A3, and A4; Office 365 Government G1, G3, and G4. Office 365 Midsize Business will have this new storage model.

Guessing Game

The changes will be a welcome bonus to SharePoint administrators and site developers that have, until now, had to play a guessing game around the resources they will have to apply to site development.

Matter Center for Office 365

The announcement dovetails with the announcement that Microsoft has developed a document management add-on for Office 365 for the legal profession. The new app, called Matter Center for Office 365, is in limited preview for the moment and available as a beta program.

The announcement was made at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

It offers legal professionals a way to find and organize files without leaving the productivity tools they use the most as well as enabling collaboration on legal matters from any device.

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