8 common governance practices every organization should implement

Introduction

Governance in MS Teams is essential to ensure information protection, safe access, and seamless collaboration. There are some common governance policies every admin must configure for enhanced security and better end-user experience. Let’s talk about them one by one –

1. Naming convention

Naming convention is helpful to maintain identity of teams. It ensures that each team created is unique and carries a specific purpose to fulfill in its lifetime. You can standardize a naming format based on teams’ department, location, or project.

2. Tagging

Tagging is an effective way to find relevant information and prevent team sprawl. Consequently, tagging helps you to quickly reach to a subset of people or hub of teams all at once. Hence, we advise you to use tags to categorize teams based on attributes such as roles, project, skill, location, etc.

3. Labeling and classification

Admins can configure a high-level classification for company’s data to ensure greater security. Therefore, you can classify data as for internal or external use, of high or low importance, private or general, etc. This helps prevent accidental sharing to unauthorized users. Correspondingly, you can use sensitivity labels to intelligently classify and protect sensitive data without hampering organization’s productivity.

4. Site provisioning

To overcome Teams mismanagement, you must bring team creation process under control without stripping users of their freedom. To do this, you should create team request form with necessary inputs for reviewal and approval. In addition, you can also opt for a third-party software to streamline such workflows for you. Our governance software TeamsHub.io simplifies everything in Microsoft Teams to minimize IT complexities and optimize experience. Using automated site provisioning and dynamic approval forms, you can avoid excessive manual work while driving controlled adoption.

5. Roles and permissions

Managing users gets easier by establishing a strong permission model in MS Teams. Different levels of users have different capabilities, ranging from moderate to advanced. By defining user roles as owner, member, or guest, you can limit what they can view, access, or edit in an application. This ensures increased control and security, and prevention of human errors and inappropriate access to content.

6. External access

Exposure of company’s private data to people outside of your organization is always risky. An external or guest user, if invited to collaborate, can easily explore and exploit Teams resources just like a native user. To protect data from misuse, loss or theft, external collaboration settings must be carefully adjusted to limit access to sensitive content. In MS Teams, various controls to configure external access are dispersed across multiple admin panels. In this case, using TeamsHub.io, you can easily manage external collaboration from a centralized automated interface.

7. Lifecycle management

Lifecycle management of teams is critical for Teams long-term success after deployment. For a healthy Teams environment and better optimization of resources, teams must not live endlessly. By enforcing expiration policies, you can enable teams archival or deletion after an inactivity period. Sadly, MS Teams doesn’t surface inactive teams directly. Moreover, if content is accidentally deleted, it can’t be restored. As the scope of Teams lifecycle management is limited, you can use TeamsHub.io as an automated solution to spare you the hassle.

8. Minimum owner policy

According to a common best practice, a team should have at least two owners to manage it. Therefore, setting minimum owner policy for a team can significantly help in reducing collaboration havoc due to ownerless teams. Minimum owner policy ensures that someone is accountable for proper functioning of that team and users create teams for better reasons.