Teams Management

In the early 2020's, a forced march to online remote work often pushed organizations to quickly and hastily deploy Teams to support business continuity. This has been a good thing and a bad thing - good from the perspective of increasing digital literacy and technical capability, but bad from a governance perspective. For many organizations, Teams has become an unmanaged area that keeps governance professionals up at night and also carries the risk of expanding the organization's storage footprint. 

While many features of teams are exceedingly valuable, it is important to understand the architectural implications of Teams, and work to fit teams into your governance blueprint for Microsoft 365. Here are some interesting architectural facts about Teams: 

• Each Team has a background SharePoint site, and that SharePoint site has a specific structure where the 'Documents' library in the site is segmented into channels, and additionally, private channels and shared channels create sub-sites.  

• Each team creates a Microsoft 365 Group, which can be re-used for access in other areas of Microsoft 365 if needed. 

Generally speaking, with these two considerations in mind, you can get a sense of why Teams creates itself a governance problem that will rapidly expand your M365 footprint without proper control. 

Additionally, from a records management perspective, creating these teams creates unmanaged spaces for content to be stored, making it harder to govern and tougher to manage those files. Adding to the governance concern, chats and channel posts are generally important forms of communication which can easily slip through the cracks as they are managed differently from other forms of communication in Microsoft 365. 

With this complexity in mind, we have a recommended set of controls to put into place in order to make your life with Teams simpler. 

1. Control the creation process and prevent a free-for-all with Teams creation. Make it so that users have to justify and request a Team. Through the fulfilment process, a small group of people with visibility into the governance of Teams should provide approval for the Team's creation and should have the chance to apply the appropriate rules, such as sensitivity / retention labels and access control before the users get access. 

2. Set a chat retention policy to eliminate unmanaged data in these areas and encourage users to avoid using Teams for important communications. By deleting data in an appropriate amount of time, users should resort to more durable forms of communication (e.g. email) for more important messages.  

3. Turn on Communication Compliance in Purview (if you have E5) to monitor for sensitive or questionable content in chats and allow your users to report any messages they feel breach rules.  

4. Set lifecycle rules for teams, ensuring that they have a defined lifespan and must be validated every so often, enabling you to delete unused teams in a timely manner. Similarly, use Teams classifications to identify and group Teams, helping with the management process. 

5. Empower owners to control group access, reducing the load on administrators. By having robust owners with appropriate training, you can task them with assuring proper access is maintained and that the other governance tasks are appropriately followed. 

6. Provide training and change management to help users understand Teams and make the most use out of the features. This will help your team adapt better to digital ways of working and will increase their adoption of tools available to them. 

While these might seem daunting, these are the core policies, procedures, and processes form the baseline for an effective governance structure in Teams, which will contribute to a better quality of life and an easier time managing the Teams content you have. 

If you are curious about how Teams fits into your overall Microsoft 365 footprint but are unsure where to start, reach out to Cadence Solutions where our Modern Work team will be happy to give you a primer on Teams and assist you through the journey to better collaboration in Teams.