3 Ways to Regain Teams Control

Why Teams governance doesn’t need to be complicated

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the way we work.

More and more of us continue to work safely in our bubbles, and remote or hybrid working is becoming the norm for many. This shift has seen a continued demand for Teams, where the use of Teams has significantly evolved from being a simple tool for video conferencing and chat to becoming a lifeline for remote work and learning, helping people and organisations remain both resilient and agile in these challenging times.

This new world of work has seen an increase in the usage intensity in Teams: In October 2020, Microsoft Teams reached 115 million daily active users – that’s an additional 40 million users since April 2020 – as people use Teams to collaborate, communicate, and co-author content across work, life, and learning.

Teams offers the power to combine meetings, chat, calls, collaboration, third-party apps, and business processes into a single experience. For many organisations, however, this comes with its own set of challenges: the user-empowered flexibility of Microsoft Teams has enabled the creation of multiple and sometimes duplicate Teams by employees – which can quickly spiral out of control.

But just because Teams is sprawling out of control, does not mean you should give up on governance.

Don’t Give up on Teams Governance

Our customers are applying three key steps to address governance in order to regain control of Microsoft Teams governance. And it’s not complicated:

1. Approvals

A major consideration when managing Teams in Microsoft 365 is whether to let users create their own or make them submit a request to an administrator. It can be a balancing act between preventing sprawl and driving productivity as you attempt to promote user self-service while reducing pressure on IT.

ProvisionPoint 365 solves this problem by providing the ability to build an approval or authorisation workflow for new Team requests.

Using the pre-defined approval processes in ProvisionPoint 365, new Teams requests can be created through simple or multi-step approval processes to different users. Approvals can either done within the ProvisionPoint 365 app or via links within email notifications sent to the approval parties, named security groups such as the IT help desk as well as the original requester in order to maintain compliance, ensure proper Teams set up and avoid sprawl – keeping everyone informed.

2. Naming Conventions

With Teams users increasing by 53% in just 6 months, that’s a lot of new Teams to manage.

With this in mind, implementing a naming strategy for Microsoft Teams is vital for any governance strategy. With ProvisionPoint 365, its easy to set a naming convention for Microsoft Teams to support users with:

• Discovery — consistent naming can help users find the correct Team, understand its purpose and avoids scenarios like 10 teams all called finance
• Privacy — communicating the privacy in the Team name can assist users better understand the sort of data which should be stored in a Team and if the Team is accessible to guest users
• Archiving — identifying business units or divisions in a Team name help administrators understand ownership when archiving Teams

A well-considered strategy for Teams naming will deliver value to both the business and the end-users.

3. Lifecycle Policies

As there is no proper disposal process in place within Microsoft 365 for Teams, administrators lack a consistent way to manage and dispose of workspaces – which presents another opportunity for the dreaded information sprawl to occur.

ProvisionPoint 365 manages the lifecycle of your Microsoft Teams – and all other Microsoft 365 workspaces- ensuring that your governance policies are enforced with minimal disruption to the end-user experience.

From setting expiry actions and defining leases to delegating key actions, ProvisionPoint 365 lets you make ownership central to your lifecycle policy. Admin can define clear ownership for each Microsoft Team to ensure each Team does not get orphaned and is managed responsibly. And it’s not only for new Teams requests, ProvisionPoint 365 can also import existing Teams and apply your new lifecycle policies so you can completely declutter and restore calm.

Are you Looking for a Teams Governance Solution?

It’s a new era.

ProvisionPoint 365 helps organisations implement governance for Teams without putting up barriers to user adoption. With pre-defined approval processes for new Team requests, easy to apply naming conventions and effective lifecycle management for both new and existing Teams – risks are mitigated. Users are empowered to do more. It’s a governance win-win.

Are you ready for a new experience with Microsoft Teams and ProvisionPoint 365? Simply get in touch today.