If you have any doubts about the importance of a proper Microsoft Teams governance strategy, the recent announcement that Microsoft Teams is now being used by 270 million users should suspend all disbelief. The reason the number of Microsoft Teams users is rapidly increasing is because organizations around the world are investing in the new and innovative ways Microsoft Teams promotes collaboration, boosts efficiency, and strengthens data security across all levels of an organization.
If you have recently invested in Microsoft Teams and are overwhelmed with the task of deploying Teams in your organization, you are not alone. Many organizations face the challenge of properly deploying Teams without avoiding time-consuming confusions and pitfalls. This article will help you deploy Microsoft Teams with best practices for your Microsoft Teams governance strategy.
Why is Microsoft Teams Governance Important?
Much like the importance of content governance, a Microsoft Teams governance strategy is crucial for maximizing the return on your investment. Before deploying Microsoft Teams throughout your organization, establishing a governance strategy will ensure that there are no gaps of information or security and no time-consuming administrative errors.
What is Microsoft Teams Governance?
When we are discussing a Microsoft Teams governance strategy, we mean the specific ways in which you configure Teams’ settings and features to manage your users, along with how those users access and share data with other users within your organization. This management must be compliant to your business standards and clearly communicated across your organization so all goals and expectations are clear.
Here are three quick tips regarding best practice for Microsoft Teams governance, along with a summary of how you may implement these practices into your business.
1. Who can create a team?
This is the first Microsoft Teams governance question to answer before deploying teams within your organization. Which of your users would you like to have the ability to create a team? Would you rather a small subset of administrative users have this ability? Or would you like all users to be able to create teams on their own?
If you limit the ability of team creation to a small subset of users, you will benefit from your teams remaining focused and goal-oriented without creating too much “noise” within your Teams environment. Some users may be negatively impacted by this decision; users who have a justified reason to create a team may have to contact IT support in order to create a team, and this may create a negative experience for some users.
If you open the ability of team creation to all users, you run the risk of having a plethora of unnecessary teams being created; however, you can still monitor and audit all created teams. The choice is yours, so take the time to consider which approach would fit best within your governance strategy.
2. Do you grant external/guest access?
This question regarding your Microsoft Teams governance strategy revolves around whether you would like your users to communicate with other organizations and/or other non-employee guests within your Microsoft Teams environment.
Granting access to external/guest users opens the door for collaborative potential within Microsoft Teams, as it expands the reach of Teams beyond the boundaries of your organization; however, external/guest access brings the risk of data security. If you choose to grant access to external/guest users, it is important to establish a proper vetting process where new external/guest users are welcomed into your Microsoft Teams environment.
3. Are you ready for all Microsoft Teams features?
Although this part of your Microsoft Teams governance strategy may seem obvious, it is important to consider which Microsoft Teams features your organization is ready for upon deployment of Microsoft Teams.
For example, if you are most excited about rolling out the teams features within Microsoft Teams, would you also like to include the video calling feature upon deployment? You may already have a video calling process in place in your organization, so perhaps it would be more beneficial to exclude the voice calling feature and just implement video calling.
Ultimately, the decision comes down to your organization’s unique preferences and needs, so it is important to take the time to determine which features will be most useful for your organization.
How Elantis Can Help
Elantis is a proud partner of ProvisionPoint Limited, a UK company specialized in workspace governance solutions for Microsoft 365. If some of the above steps seem daunting for your Microsoft Teams governance strategy, Elantis can help. As a ProvisionPoint Certified Partner, Elantis can help you drive adoption of Microsoft 365 and solve your governance challenges.
If you’d like to know more about what you should do after adopting Microsoft Teams, please register for the “Microsoft Teams: Taming the Wild West” webinar we are co-hosting with ProvisionPoint on July 27th, where we will discuss how to manage governance, administration, content sharing, and more!
