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User experience in a Multi-Geo environment

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Here's what your users see in a OneDrive Multi-Geo configuration:

Exchange Online mailbox

A user's Exchange Online mailbox is provisioned to their preferred data location, and is automatically relocated if their PDL changes. Users can use Outlook and Outlook on the web normally with no change in user experience in a Multi-Geo environment.

Hub sites

SharePoint Hub sites enhance the discovery and engagement with content for employees, while creating a complete and consistent representation of projects, departments or regions. In a Multi-Geo environment, sites from satellite locations can easily be associated with a hub site regardless the hub site's Geography location. Users can search and get results across the hub through a single search experience, regardless of the geo location of the sites.

Microsoft 365 app launcher

The app launcher is multi-geo aware and will direct each tile to the appropriate geo location of the workload. The SharePoint and OneDrive tiles point the user to the location corresponding to the user's provisioned geo location. This means that if the user has a OneDrive in the central location, their SharePoint tile points them to SP Home in the central location but their group site will be provisioned in the location corresponding to their PDL.

Office applications

Office applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will automatically detect the correct OneDrive geo-location for each user when they sign in. Users don't need to enter the geo-specific URL for their OneDrive or SharePoint sites.

OneDrive sync app

The OneDrive sync app (version 17.3.6943.0625 and later) will automatically detect the correct OneDrive Geography location for the user. Sync app support includes the ability to sync groups-based sites regardless of their Geography location. The Groove sync client isn't supported for Multi-Geo.

OneDrive location

Users have their OneDrive provisioned in their preferred data location. If a user navigates to a OneDrive URL that contains an incorrect Geography location (such as a bookmark from a previous geo location), they're automatically redirected to the OneDrive in the appropriate geo location.

OneDrive iOS and Android

The OneDrive iOS and Android mobile apps show you your OneDrive files and files shared with you regardless of their Geography location. Searches from the OneDrive mobile apps show relevant results from all Geography locations. Download the latest version of these apps.

For more information, see Use OneDrive on iOS and Use OneDrive for Android for more information.

OneDrive mobile client

The OneDrive mobile client is Multi-Geo aware and will display pertinent content and results from all Geography locations.

Each Geography location has its own search index and Search Center. When a user searches, the query is sent to all the Geography locations, and the returned results are merged and then ranked so the user gets unified results. Users get results from all Geography locations regardless of their own Geography location. See Configure Search for OneDrive Multi-Geo for specifics.

The following search clients are supported:

  • OneDrive

  • Office Delve

  • SharePoint Home

  • The Search Center

  • Custom search applications that use the SharePoint Search API

SharePoint Home

In SharePoint Multi-Geo, your SharePoint home is hosted in the location where the user resides as determined by their OneDrive location. For example: if the user has their OneDrive hosted in a European satellite location, their SharePoint Home is rendered from Europe. SharePoint home includes all content relevant to the user regardless of its Geography location.

Followed Sites, News from Sites, Recent Sites, Frequent Sites, and Suggested sites

All of these components show up for the user regardless of the Geography location where the content is hosted, so long as the user has permissions to said content.

Featured Links

Admins can configure Featured links in SharePoint home as appropriate to each Geography location. This allows the admin to feature in the SP Home for each region the links that are appropriate for users in the region.

SharePoint mobile client

The SharePoint mobile client is multi-geo aware and will display pertinent content and results from all geo locations.

Sharing

The people picker experience shows all users regardless of their Geography location. This allows a user to share with another user in their same geo or in any other of your Tenant's Geography locations. Content from different Geography locations shows up in the Shared with Me view in the user's OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Office.com and can be accessed with single sign-On experience regardless of which Geography location it's hosted in.

Microsoft Teams experience

Microsoft Teams is a Multi-Geo service. OneDrive files and recently viewed files are shown regardless of the user's Geography location. @ mentions work with users from all Geography locations.

Microsoft 365 Person experience

The Microsoft 365 Person encompasses the complete set of properties, attributes and associated people contacts that are representative of a user in the Microsoft 365 tenant. The Microsoft 365 Person dataset is mastered and stored in the Primary Data Location of the user.

There are two constituents of the Microsoft 365 Person data:

  • Microsoft 365 Profile (profile resource type), which constitutes the information that can be viewed by other users within the tenant about the Microsoft 365 person. This includes the user's Microsoft Entra ID details along with other information like position and photo (Get profilePhoto). The fields and attributes that are exposed can be controlled by the tenant admin (Add or remove custom attributes on a profile card using the profile card API).

  • My Microsoft 365 People dataset (contact resource type), which represents the list of the user's Microsoft 365 contacts along with the user’s version of their contacts' Microsoft 365 profile. This edited or unedited version of another user’s profile will always remain private in the current user’s mailbox and won't be replicated anywhere.

To enable discovery, organizational structure exploration, rich people search, and full fidelity collaboration experiences, the Global Address List (GAL) and the Microsoft 365 Profile of users in the tenant is replicated and kept in sync across geos both when a Multi-Geo tenant is first set up and in response to certain user actions. Examples of user actions include direct and indirect interactions with one or more users in the tenant via activities like becoming part of the Organization, creating and/or joining Teams meetings, sharing and/or co-editing files, profile card lookup, and adding of contacts as described in Add, find, edit, or delete a contact in Outlook.

In addition to the central GAL, replicated Microsoft 365 Profiles of other users from an interaction or collaboration are stored in the Microsoft 365 People dataset of the target user's mailbox.