With a massive rise in the adoption of MS Teams and growing organizations, using it can become challenging. Failing to set a governance policy would confuse the users, bring gaps in security compliances, and eventually hamper productivity in organizations.
Having a clear governance policy for Teams is crucial, to enable easy access to the content and to ensure secure and controlled shareability. Yet many organizations are finding it difficult to organize their workspaces, messages, and documents as they ignored and neglected Governance before rolling it out for their employees. Setting up a Teams Governance policy would help.
Continue Reading
It would also assist the IT departments to solve the information overload issues and enable the users to simplify their work while having a pleasant digital workplace experience.
You can obtain complete potential if you define the set of people, processes, and structure in Teams while ensuring safe, efficient, and successful collaboration in your organization.
It means how you manage the users and allow them to access data in compliance with business security policies. Microsoft Teams Governance is the key to effective collaboration in Teams.
With defined governance principles, you let the users know what is expected from them.
For instance, if the users knew the rules or criteria for creating teams and channels, they wouldn’t duplicate the channels. And they can create channels with proper naming conventions. This helps in avoiding any confusion and the other users might also be aware of the purpose of channel creation. This can be a lifesaver when they move from project to project or even team to team.
But it doesn’t get resolved with just the names and the naming conventions. There’s so much more to Teams Governance. It is also about ownership, rules to be set for teams, retentions, guest access, archiving redundant ones, and deleting when not of any use.
Determine who can create teams Decide who can manage guest access Standardize naming conventions Manage third-party app availability Deleting and archiving content Know when to have public teams and private teams Know the difference- Standard and Private channels
Do you want everyone to create teams? Absolutely not!
When creations are not managed, you’d end up having duplicate teams with no purpose. And the sight of the backend would just be a heap of empty SharePoint sites.
So, you might want to restrict teams’ creation by removing the ability to create any Office 365 groups. But what about the users who genuinely need and want to create teams? They can use any app like Dropbox for file sharing for that matter. And if these apps aren’t your organization’s choice, then there is a risk of security and ISO accreditations.
You can still try the following options for controlling teams’ creation
External guests can join Teams and access the files, chats, and apps directly. But allowing all your users to add guests would only tally up more trouble at the back end. You can control this in the Teams Admin center or using the Active Directory and change the setting on a global level.
You can also try controlling on a team-by-team basis using sensitivity labels.
When you start setting up the channels in Teams, at first everything might look organized. But as the team grows and as you allow members to join in, there will be channels with different names according to the users who created them. And it will eventually lead to inconsistency in channel names leading to more confusion.
Generic and common names work when your organization has just started and is yet to grow. But for companies that are expanding their footprints across various domains and multiple places, generic names like ‘Marketing’ might be one among the 5-6 Marketing Teams.
To ensure effective and easy collaboration, follow these rules to structure and set the rules for naming conventions
Once the policies are clear and communicated in the organization, move on to the next one – determine third-party apps to be used in your organization. The benefit of allowing your teams to install and use (any app from the 600 third-party apps available in the Microsoft store) on their own is that they can install and use apps without your intervention – without raising a ticket every time they need one.
But there’s also a downside to it. What if all the users install the apps and start using them randomly? To maintain consistency, it is very important to determine and communicate which app they can access on their own and for which app they’d need to raise a request each time they need one.
You can brainstorm with the heads of each department to analyze and come to a point on which app they’d need, and based on their requirement you can control the third-party apps to be used in your organization.
You can control using the ‘Manage apps page’ in the Teams admin center.
Go through the list of third-party apps and toggle on/off based on your needs. You can also change the setting of newly published apps by default or turn them off to manage on a one-by-one basis.
Do you know what happens when you delete the content from Teams? If you are the Teams administrator, for effective Teams governance, it is important to know where does the archived or deleted content goes. When the user deletes the content in Teams, it gets removed from the channel and the SharePoint site too.
What happens when you delete the teams in Microsoft Teams?
When you delete a team, the entire team along with activity, files, chats, and every content in it gets deleted. It also deletes the channel and the SharePoint site that is associated with it.
If you think you’ll need them again in the future, you can always archive them instead of deleting them.
To delete the team, open the Teams Admin Center and select the team’s name under the Teams. Click on Delete and confirm. In case you deleted the channels by mistake, you can restore them within 30 days.
And what happens when you Archive teams in Microsoft Teams?
This action of archiving the team freezes the activity but you can still add or remove members.
To archive the team, open the Teams Admin Center and select the team’s name you wish to archive under Teams. Click on Archive and confirm.
To Unarchive and restore, repeat the same process and activate the team again.
You can also set an expiry for the unused teams and dispose of them when they are no longer in use.
There are three types of teams in Microsoft Teams.
Public teams are for all the members of the organization(tenant). It needs no approval and it is discoverable to all the users in the organization. These are for company-wide talks or any casual topics.
Private teams are hidden and require the owners to allow new members to join the team. Here, the other members will have the least privilege or access to data and you can grant access as and when needed.
But can private teams be converted into public teams?
Yes. You can change them by editing the privacy settings.
team name > More options > Edit team > Privacy > Public or private
And finally, SAVE the changes!
Org-wide teams are automated ones that add everyone from the organization for any discussion or announcement. Should you need more than one Org-wide team for your organization, you can always create one.
Standard/Public channel: Any member of the team can have access to the messages, files, and meetings within the channel. When you delete a Standard channel, it will get deleted in Teams but the folder will remain in SharePoint.
Private channel: you’ll need an invite to join the channel and it is specific for some people only – not accessible for all. But once you join, you can access the files and the rest of the content in it. This is exclusively for private conversations and collaborations among just a few members. When you delete a private channel, it deletes the channel as well as the site.
Microsoft Teams Governance can help you eliminate inconsistencies, promote data security, and bring everything to one place by organizing your content.
If you are planning to move from Slack to Teams, We know how messy things can be.
Would you like to know more and work on your cluttered and messed up Teams workspace?
Sign up now to get Teams Governance Support and make your Teams Governance no less than a breeze!
Let’s get into a call and discuss your Slack to Teams migration today!
Call Us : +1 732 737 9188
Email Us : sales@avasoft.com
Book a Demo
Connect with our experts!
+1 732 737 9188
sales@avasoft.com