Microsoft Teams governance strategies & best practices

Introduction

What if you overlook Microsoft Teams governance after rolling it out in your organization? The answer is, you can still see a massive rise in adoption at initial stage but gradually it will kill workplace productivity. With this regard, using governance in Teams is paramount. As governance lets you define people, processes, and structure in Teams, you can draw a full value out of Teams while ensuring security.

In this blog, we will learn about MS Teams governance best practices to ensure efficient and successful collaboration at workplaces.

Important considerations for MS Teams governance

1. Determine who will create teams

In MS Teams, you can define three different levels of administrative rights and privileges to users – Administrators, Owners and Members. Furthermore, you should determine who can create teams to avoid an uncontrolled growth.

You cannot completely refrain users from creation of teams as this may lead to Shadow IT and other security challenges. To counteract this, you should consider implementing self-service provisioning with rules and policies. An approval system may work well here as user’s requirements and purpose behind creation of teams can be identified easily.

2. Follow a nomenclature for teams

Teams, when appropriately named, can be organized in a better way which enhances findability. Other than that, establishing naming policies prevent duplication of teams.

You should standardize naming conventions for creating teams as it greatly impacts MS Teams and Office 365 governance. You can use indicators such as department, location, etc. and abbreviations for naming teams or groups.

3. Manage external access

External access management is one of the critical aspects of collaboration where MS Teams governance is most required. In Teams, guest users can have almost equal capabilities as native team members. And hence, they can easily exercise control over teams and teams’ resources.

Inviting guest users to your organization are unavoidable certain times. As such, imposing limitations in place before granting external access is extremely important to avoid security risks. Based on the sensitivity of your data, you can define various levels of access, permissions, or privileges to guest users.

4. Data security

Set up device and app management to prevent data leakages at insecure endpoints while using different devices and third-party apps. Other than that, you should build an information protection architecture to meet compliance and litigation requirements in your Teams environment. Using Office 365 security tools such as eDiscovery, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), etc., you can track as well as protect your information.

5. Manage lifecycle of teams

Disposing unwanted teams after a specified time helps in effective administration by enhancing visibility. Additionally, you can archive teams if they need to be restored for further use in future. For this, you can decide to set expiration policies in number of days for inactive teams. This practice lets you evaluate health of teams and analyse their performance to make better decisions.

Automate MS Teams governance

MS Teams governance effectively brings everything in order, eliminates inconsistencies and promotes security. But managing all operations company-wide is still not easy and increases administrator’s workloads day by day. As teams and content may keep growing with time, business processes get critical and complex both. Henceforth, dealing with multiple processes for one task may greatly increase administrator’s ordeal.

With this regard, Microsoft Teams governance tools such as TeamsHub by Cyclotron can be used to simplify governance by automation. TeamsHub by Cyclotron eliminates the need to perform complex PowerShell operations by offering an easy to use and unified interface. The governance features in TeamsHub by Cyclotron helps an organization define and execute the rules for Microsoft Teams governance. This results in achieving better administrative controls and frictionless end user adoption.

TeamsHub by Cyclotron automates MS Teams governance, makes administration efficient and improves productivity in many ways. Here are a few things you can do using TeamsHub by Cyclotron to make Teams governance a breeze for you –

• Automate team requests and creation using templates, approval workflows and dynamic forms using custom metadata columns
• Manage how Teams are named using a managed blocked word list and custom policies
• Classify, tag and label teams for better categorization and protection
• Hubify teams that belong to similar category
• Enable guest access on different levels
• Control the expiry, retention and disposal of Teams based on usage and activity
• Allow multiple teams to be edited and updated together
• Use dashboard to track or monitor data shared externally
• Prevent data leakage by integrating Azure services for security and compliance
• Detailed and interactive reporting based on various criteria such as usage, engagement, adoption
• Narrow down exact information using criteria, filters, and tags for a quick and acute search functionality
• Auto schedule and email reports for daily, weekly, or monthly details to selected recipients

If you want to know more about how to automate MS Teams governance using TeamsHub by Cyclotron, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo