MC878427: Restricted Content Discoverability for SharePoint Sites

Announcement IDMC878427Published Date08-30-2024
ServiceGeneralLast Updated11-26-2024
CategoryStay informedExpiration Date05-12-2025
Roadmap IDAction Required by Date
TagsAdmin impact, New feature


Summary
                The message details the Restricted Content Discoverability (RCD) feature for SharePoint, which allows administrators to exclude sites from organization-wide search and Microsoft 365 Chat. It will be generally available from mid-February 2025 to late March 2025, is opt-in, and requires specific commands to enable. Eligibility extends to Copilot customers with SharePoint Advanced Management. RCD does not affect other search-dependent features.


More Information

Restricted Content Discoverability (RCD) is a feature that allows SharePoint Administrators to restrict specific SharePoint sites from participating in organization wide search and Microsoft 365 Chat.

Once RCD is set on a given SharePoint site, all content from the site will be hidden from tenant-wide search and Microsoft 365 Chat by default for all users in the tenant, even if a user has site access permissions.

While child content will be hidden by default, users will still be able to search for content they have recently interacted with. This includes recently accessed and modified files, even if RCD is applied to the parent site. Searches originating from a site context will not be impacted.

When RCD is applied to a site, the following endpoints will honor the restriction:

  • Tenant-wide search in SharePoint Home, Office.com, and Bing.
  • Microsoft 365 Chat in Teams
  • Copilot in Bing at Work
  • Copilot in Office application, such as Copilot in Word, when searching for information or files across the tenant

When will this happen:

Public Preview: We will begin rolling out mid-November 2024 and expect to complete by mid-December 2024 (previously late December).

General Availability: We will begin rolling out mid-February 2025 and expect to complete late March 2025 

How this will affect your organization:

No impact to your organization. This is an opt-in feature and SharePoint administrator needs to explicitly set this on a per site basis.

Note: If you are interested in trying this feature "now" along with all of our preview features related to managing SharePoint, then just send an email to sam_preview_program@microsoft.com with subject "Join- SharePoint Advanced Management"

What you need to do to prepare:

Complete the following steps to enable this setting for the site you identify.

  • To apply RCD on a SharePoint site, run the following command using latest version of SharePoint Online Management Shell:

    Set-SPOSite -identity <site-url> -RestrictContentOrgWideSearch $true

  • To view the RCD configuration for a given site:

    Get-SPOSite -identity <site-url> | Select RestrictContentOrgWideSearch

Frequently Asked Questions:

  • Is my organization eligible to use RCD?

    This setting is available to all Copilot customers with SharePoint Advanced Management purchased.

  • Does RCD impact other features with dependencies on the search index, such as the Purview product suite?

    No, RCD only affects tenant-wide search endpoints and Copilot.

  • How soon can I expect Search and Copilot to reflect an update made to the RCD configuration of a site?

    RCD is a site-level property. As with all site settings, index update latency is highly dependent on the number of items in the site and the number of sites getting updated at the same time.

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