Introduction

Due to a change in work environment, many organizations are adopting Microsoft Teams platform hastily. This may soon lead to many administrative challenges if proper management plan is not implemented. Lack of governance and security policies can easily derail the efficacy of Microsoft Teams and productivity goals it is meant to fulfill.

In this blog, we will share some important tips for efficient Teams management for IT admins. Later, we will discuss how TeamsHub.io can help regain better control on Teams by leveraging automation. Let’s start –

1. Set governance policies

Establish right team ownership and membership to control the sharing of information, decide who can create teams and set up approval workflows to reduce admin workloads, configure tagging and labeling for better classification and protection of content, and enforce naming conventions to keep workspace well-structured and organized for teams. You can also create messaging policies, custom calling policies and manage meeting settings as per organizational needs.

2. Lifecycle management

Managing lifecycle of teams helps in reducing Teams sprawl, maintaining orderliness, and enhancing visibility. To do this, you must create a team with a naming convention, classify it based on its confidentiality to enhance protection, manage who has access to the team and who has not, control guest access for better security and watch out for ownerless or orphaned teams. Furthermore, you must set up expiration policies to identify active and inactive teams to take an action. You can either choose to archive a team if it needs restoration sometime in future or delete it if its purpose is over.

3. External collaboration

To limit oversharing of sensitive information, you can configure a secure guest collaboration with appropriate org-wide security settings. To do this, you need to use security features such as sensitivity labels and navigate to different admin centers to manage variety of configurations for baseline, sensitive and highly sensitive content. Also, depending on the sensitivity of a given piece of information, you may want to allow sharing with anyone (unauthenticated), people inside the organization, specific people inside the organization or specific people inside and outside the organization.

4. Manage Teams apps

As Teams adoption escalates, managing third-party cloud apps becomes critical as it may lead to security issues such as shadow IT. Using Teams admin center, admins can control the use of such apps by enabling or disabling the capability to download. Additionally, a custom policy can also be created to make only specific apps available for users in your organization.

5. Monitoring and reporting

You can view usage information and monitor Teams activities through different collaboration reports for effective management. Microsoft 365 reports give you quick insights into all happenings in your tenant. This includes reports about users who actively use the platform, content that is frequently shared in and outside the organization, kinds of devices and apps that are used, what users frequently search for and more.

Effortless administration through TeamsHub.io

To define Teams policies and use all the aforementioned features, admins can either choose to configure settings using Microsoft Teams admin center, create PowerShell scripts or use Power Automate for some trigger a few functionalities. However, its extremely tedious and time consuming to manage a multitude of teams manually in a traditional way. The responsibility to accurately input information, remember to notify users to move the project along or complete critical tasks repeatedly is not easy.

To speed up management, all that an admin needs is a single pane of glass to be able to view all features clearly and configure settings then and there. This is where TeamsHub.io steps in to automate processes to make the job easier and error-free.

TeamsHub.io is an automated third-party governance platform using which you can do everything which you can’t in MS Teams. TeamsHub.io is designed to enable admins to efficiently manage, govern and monitor entire Microsoft 365 tenant. Using automation through TeamsHub.io, an admin can have a bird’s eye view of the process so that they can track progress in real-time, detect potential anomalies and allocate more or fewer resources as and when needed.

From a user-friendly and zero-code platform in TeamsHub.io, you can –

• Activate self-service provisioning where users will have freedom to create teams within organizational policies.
• Automate request-approval form for team/site creation and use templates to create teams faster.
• Create custom site types for high level of categorization of teams/sites.
• Manage permissions, memberships, and control access.
• Establish naming schemes and apply sensitivity labels to protect valuable data through its travel journey.
• Manage lifecycle of teams and discover inactive teams automatically.
• Update teams in bulk – edit members, owners, tags, etc., in a single attempt with no hassle of updating them individually.
• Automate custom notifications and alerts and schedule email delivery.
• Monitor all teams and user activities and resources shared in real-time from within teams and outside of organization through a powerful dashboard.
• Grab actionable insights through live reports into teams inventory, device usage, governance settings, workload activities, audit logs, apps installed and much more without switching to multiple admin interfaces.

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