Automate approval and provisioning for Microsoft Teams teams

Introduction

Creating teams and channels for collaborating in real-time with other members is the core capability of Microsoft Teams. However, Microsoft Teams is a platform that can do more than that – unifying every single thing like conversation, files, apps, projects, forms, boards etc. in one place, necessary for teamwork. In fact, it is so user-friendly that anyone would want to a create a new team and get a group of users collaborating in no time.

That sounds great, but there also are a few challenges! Allowing users to create teams recklessly may cause chaos in Teams ecosystem, especially if you are a large organization. And, therefore, it needs effective administration in place.

Let’s elaborate on this further –

The problem:

Teams creation may get out of hand when people use different naming conventions. Many times, people create random teams without thinking about the goals they must accomplish. As a result, teams are formed without a purpose and accountability. Moreover, teams are created with the same name. All of this ends up in teams sprawl which unleashes many other issues further like information overload, data invisibility, difficulty in searching and sorting of content, loss of information, and so on.

The solution:

To overcome the issue of uncontrolled growth of teams, some organizations prefer disabling the user-driven creation of teams. But at the same time, there is a downside. Turning off the feature completely will make users lose interest in using it. Understandably, if you deprive users of creative freedom to explore and learn from Microsoft Teams, you will hamper the acceptance of the tool as well as its adoption.

Hence, what we recommend here is a controlled version of team creation. This involves –

a) Lifecycle management of teams to eradicate the cluttered experience in Teams.

b) An approval-based system to streamline the process.

Now, considering these two aspects of governance, let us learn how you can simplify the Microsoft Teams creation process using our application ‘TeamsHub by Cyclotron’ by leveraging the power of automation to give you a code-free experience.

Managing the lifecycle of teams using TeamsHub by Cyclotron

Create – Use – Archive – Dispose. When teams are created for a project, they must exist with a lifespan. So, how we do it?

Firstly, our automation software called TeamsHub by Cyclotron ensures that no teams are created with non-informative names and they are not ownerless. Secondly, you can configure expiration and retention policies to clean up inactive teams after a specified amount of time by either archiving or deleting them automatically.

To learn more about the lifecycle management of teams using TeamsHub by Cyclotron, please click here.

Automate provisioning using TeamsHub by Cyclotron

TeamsHub by Cyclotron automates approval and provisioning for your users’ teams for –

1. Activating self-service provisioning of new teams while asking for additional metadata to allow administrative control.
2. Enhancing search and filtering capabilities of teams by using the provided metadata for easy discoverability and organization of content.

Self-service provisioning is one of the governance strategies which automates the approval process by creating a dynamic request form. In TeamsHub by Cyclotron, a team can either be created from scratch or by using templates. Later, the request form that it provides, is completely customizable and flexible where columns can be added or deleted as per organizational requirements.

Once a request form captures a team profile data, it is finally submitted and awaits the administrator’s approval.

To know more about automated site provisioning using dynamic forms, please read this.

Conclusion

Using site provisioning (or self-service process) feature by TeamsHub by Cyclotron, users can be empowered while avoiding information sprawl, redundancy, or loss without compromising functionality.

Are you interested to put your Microsoft Teams creation process into place? If yes, then use one of the following ways to execute it –

• Build your own automated application to support Microsoft Teams creation process if you have the knowledge in-house.
• Reach out to a Microsoft 365 consultant to let you guide through the technicalities of Microsoft team automation.
• Buy a third-party automation tool like TeamsHub by Cyclotron to automate workflows and streamline Microsoft Teams creation to make it easier and faster for you.

If the size of your business is large and your organizational needs are complex, consider TeamsHub by Cyclotron as a one-stop governance tool for Microsoft 365 automation which will save you money in the long run.

To know more about TeamsHub by Cyclotron, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo