April 07, 2020 Automated Lifecycle Management for Teams This article explores how Teams lifecycle governance can be automated and managed using TeamsHub from Cyclotron Introduction Firstly, organizations and administrators should focus on three main aspects of the automated lifecycle management of Microsoft Teams to streamline governance. Provisioning: Teams request, approval, and creation Operations: Managing information access and containers Information Lifecycle: Retain, expire and disposal of Teams With this intention in mind, TeamsHub by Cyclotron provides automated lifecycle management. This eliminates tons of manual provisioning issues. Secondly, any administrator surely wants streamlined governance which includes Avoiding teams or sites sprawl and duplication.Avoiding Teams without owners or orphaned TeamsDeploying a consistent architecture for the tenant environmentDefine naming policies for Teams based on custom attributesAssigning correct roles and responsibilities to each Team memberOrganize frequently used Teams together as “Hubs”Providing an automated workflow for team site creation and approvalImplementing enhanced security controls Now let us look at some of the scenarios below to automate the lifecycle management of Microsoft Teams using TeamsHub by Cyclotron. Automate creating a new team or site The lifecycle starts with creating a Team. So, an administrator can enable Site and Team creation, whereby users can request a Team or SharePoint Site and choose to make it either Public or Private. Users can search Teams marked Public easily and the user is free to join that team. Owners control access to Private Teams. A point to note – build a Team from scratch or by using an existing template. In either case, TeamsHub by Cyclotron grabs essential details popping up a quick request form for the user to fill out. Along with defaults such as Title and Description, the request form also asks some additional metadata which can be specified by the administrator in the site provisioning settings. On submission, the request goes for an administrator’s approval. We take this a step further using governance automation which is described below. Automate site provisioning A key feature of TeamsHub by Cyclotron which allows Self-service provisioning of Teams while managing approvals based on business processes through dynamic forms and external workflows. Creating or restricting the creation of Teams to specific groups. It also makes guest management and policy management easy along with refraining users to use certain keywords while naming their Teams. Automate classifying and tagging Teams Easily create text-based classifications for Teams such as internal, personal, business, important, etc., depending upon their unique identity, strength or structure. A second level categorization of Teams is also available based on role, project or skill. Apply another tagging dimension to Teams to classify them by expertise or departments such as IT, marketing, product, sales, etc. Unified tagging and classification expedite discoverability, as well as easing navigation. Searching Teams TeamsHub by Cyclotron, lets you find Teams by three search parameters viz. name, tags, classification. Additionally, we provide advanced search capabilities using Team name, visibility (Public or Private), members/owner, tag and classification to help administrators narrow down quickly to the desired information. Store this search result further or save it as a Hub based on organizational needs. Manage Team owners and members Add new participants as owners or members to the selected Team in the search. Also, existing owners or members can be deleted from the Team. Moreover, with a user-friendly interface and convenient tile-view, the roles of owners or members can be swapped without hassle or complex scripting. Team Details Automate expiration policy for inactive Teams Teams get inactive after the end of a project or once they have served their purpose. To avoid teams sprawl and have active content as well as usage, TeamsHub by Cyclotron provides the auto archival of Teams by setting an expiration policy. An expiration policy triggers a crawl through the database to uncover Teams that cross the inactivity threshold. This crawler seeks the last activity generated by users of that particular team. This is closely related to the Daily Activity Usage as defined by Microsoft. Some of the criteria include chats, and conversations, emails being sent, and files shared within a Team or group. Expiration Policies A few policies can be set to ensure no Team is deleted by accident Owner Policy: A set of rules that require owners to review and determine the next course of action. TeamsHub by Cyclotron sends periodic notifications ( in days) to Team owners to review the Teams they own. Actions that an owner might take are – deleting a member of the Team or deleting the entire Team if it has already served its purpose. Owners can revoke access for important files or documents that are shared within the Team or externally. Flexibility to modify the review deadline as per their choice. Inactive Team Policy: Notify Team owners by email if no activity is detected in the specified time period. The email contents can be structured and customized as per needs. The owner can then decide based on the response, whether to mark a Team inactive. Archive Team Policy: Send email notifications to inactive teams. The automatic email notification contains the Team name, description, members list, and last date of an activity. Additionally, it provides a link to archive it with a confirmation. If owner fails to act, Team is archived automatically after sending a few reminders. Team Deletion Policy: Similar to Archive Team Policy, except that if the owner of the Team fails to take any action, TeamsHub by Cyclotron doesn’t delete the Team automatically. Summary So in summary, we can manage Microsoft Teams better and experience easy and convenient lifecycle management. TeamsHub by Cyclotron enables you to work with clean, accurate and relevant information at all times saving you from inadvertent and costly mistakes while ensuring that you share updated content always. We promise you an effortless and happy administration and streamlined governance! Suggested Reading Microsoft Teams Governance Best PracticesAutomate Microsoft Teams Governance using TeamsHub by CyclotronAutomate Top5 governance features in Microsoft Teams About Cyclotron Cyclotron was proudly founded in San Francisco in 2014 with the sole intent of accelerating the success of our clients by solving mission-critical business and technology challenges, through a proven network of industry-specific frameworks. We’re a trusted strategic partner to many innovative organizations in the financial, health and life sciences, public, retail, and technology sectors. Our solutions combined with your investment with us boosts productivity, enhances collaboration, and integrates intelligence across your entire enterprise.
April 06, 2020 Automate Microsoft Teams Governance using TeamsHub by Cyclotron In this article we deep dive into the technical aspects to match theory to practice. Managing a complex environment such as Microsoft Teams can be challenging as well. We will cover some scenarios and provide a few features of TeamsHub that help mitigate it. We will list out a few real-world scenarios to automate Microsoft Teams governance. We will also demonstrate how TeamsHub by Cyclotron helps solve them. For our previous article on Microsoft Teams governance best practices – click here NOTE: The user interfaces have been slightly modified or masked to prevent plagiarism. Scenario 1 Complex Powershell Operations: In Microsoft Teams, an administrator is required to create and manage Teams’ governance through complex Powershell commands. Our solution to this problem is to provide a simplified solution and interface. We empower administrative capabilities for enhanced control. We believe in automating the workload and tasks in the background. No more Powershell commands. Say hello to automated Microsoft Teams governance. A beautifully designed interface collates all Teams together. It also provides other details such as members, owners, tags, public or private, etc. in a single pane of glass. We also provide the total number of teams as a quick reference to the sprawl in the environment. The image below shows the administrative interface available today to streamline manual tasks with various commands. In addition, we provide Site Provisioning. It allows you to automate Microsoft Team governance for site creation and management. This is achieved by Utilizing dynamic forms and external workflows. Defining naming policies based on custom attributes and by using templates. After the above setup, the following screen will show up for an end-user when requesting site creation. Scenario 2 General Governance: Microsoft Teams allows anyone to create a team and its associated SharePoint sites. Eventually, a multitude of Teams causes duplicate naming, inappropriately named teams and frustrated users. Consequently, this may also lead to orphaned teams and owners leading to information loss. We provide a user-friendly interface to automate Microsoft Teams governance, expiration policy, and guest access external users. Using our Governance settings, administrators can manage Teams’ creation and lifecycle using automated workflows. Other settings include managing guests, naming policies abased on standard blocked words and custom blocked words. In addition, we can set up expiration policies for each team via a set of rules and notifications such as Notifications to alert team owners on certain actions that need to be takenAlerts during the period of inactivity before Teams can be disposed or archived, Scenario 3 Teams Classification: Most of the time, finding the right information, content or people is a tedious operation. This is true for both administrators and end-users. Firstly, Administrators have a hard time finding the owner or members of a team. Secondly, if the team can be correctly classified by a label or tag for discoverability. TeamsHub by Cyclotron provides unified tagging and classification. This helps derive quick information and reduce overheads by updating multiple teams in one go. TeamsHub by Cyclotron, enables assigning of organization-specific classification. Administrators can publish organizational tags to appropriate groups whereas users can create and remove personal tags to their own groups. With this in mind, administrators can create Hubs – frequently used sites grouped by certain criteria. This helps in finding the right information quickly for end-users without having to search or find it. Manually adding and editing details per team is a tedious and time-consuming process – ask an administrator. Such updates include members, owners, description, and classification of Teams. So, we provide an easy to use a feature called Bulk Update to address this issue. Bulk Update provides administrators, editing capabilities across multiple teams in a single attempt. No more tedious processing and updating of details one by one. Scenario 4 Advanced Search and Reporting: Better search functionality leads to funnel information. This can be achieved by defining filters to get the desired result. The screen below shows the search functionality. Our Interactive Reporting allows administrators to gain smart insights. Actionable reports on various criteria such as metadata usage, team usage, or device and browser segmentation are available. Reports can also be exported to other formats such as Excel and JSON to integrate with third-party visualization tools. We provide native integration with PowerBI as well. Scenario 5 External Document Sharing, Data Protection, and Security: Collaboration involves external vendors and third-party contractors as well. With this intention, sharing documents with guest users requires some caution and inbuilt checks to prevent data leaks. We have automated robust supervision and document tracking for sharing confidential data with external parties. We provide best in class features of Office365 and Azure – Azure Information Protection, Data Loss Prevention and Information Rights Management. Additionally, we provide administrators a unified view of externally shared content. Our solution called Enhanced Security provides automatic provisioning of Information Rights Management (IRM) policies. Along with integrated Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies enables administrators to manage, track and revoke access for all externally shared documents in a single place. In summary, TeamsHub by Cyclotron provides a robust set of automated governance tools to help administrators manage Microsoft Teams efficiently. Using governance best practices as features in TeamsHub by Cyclotron, helps address some of the most pertinent issues. These are Teams sprawl, content sprawl, and security, as well as structure and permission models. In addition, we provide advanced Office 365 features such as IRM and DLP along with AIP About Cyclotron Cyclotron was proudly founded in San Francisco in 2014 with the sole intent of accelerating the success of our clients. We solve mission-critical business and technology challenges, through a proven network of industry-specific frameworks. We’re a trusted strategic partner to many innovative organizations in the financial, health and life sciences, public, retail, and technology sectors. Our solutions combined with your investment with us boosts productivity, enhances collaboration, and integrates intelligence across your entire enterprise.
