The Problem with Microsoft Teams Governance

Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups are incredibly powerful productivity tools for modern collaboration, but as with any other collaboration or communication tools, without proper governance they can  quickly get out of control. Allowing anyone in the organization to create new groups, without some kind of oversight of the provisioning process, can lead to confusion. At the same time, it is important not to stifle adoption and all its benefits by being overly restrictive. As I often say,

The more controls you put in place, the less likely people will adhere to the technology.

If all requests go through a gatekeeper, and setting up a new Team becomes a lengthy and complicated process, people will simply choose a different solution. In fact, it is fair to say that the rise of Shadow IT within an organization is often in direct proportion to the increase in collaboration constraints and controls.

In a new whitepaper from MVP Peter Carson (@carsonpeter) and the team at Extranet User Manager (EUM.co), some of the most pressing issues with Microsoft Teams governance are addressed, including:

• Multiple Teams created for the same purpose
• Redundant or unnecessary empty Teams
• Challenges finding the correct Team Sites due to the lack of a hierarchy
• Inconsistent Team structure due to the numerous different ways they can be created
• Corporate standards and templates not being used

EUM provides an open source, self-service solution that empowers business users to create Teams and Office 365 Groups in an approved and consistent way, while avoiding out of control provisioning or having to wait for IT administrators to complete requests. With this foundation in place, the provisioning process can be completely automated within Office 365, saving users valuable time while also maintaining governance and control over the environment.

At a high-level the solution provides:

• Self-service forms for requesting new Office 365 Groups, SharePoint sites, Teams and Channels
• Automated workflows for approvals (if desired) and provisioning
• Creation of the Team, SharePoint site, OneNote, Planner, and Channel in a consistent, templated manner
• Automation of SharePoint, OneNote, and Planner when creating new Teams Channels

The net result is that users will benefit from a consistent Teams experience, with tabs, sites, files, OneNote sections, and Planner buckets and tasks all pre-configured. This makes it very easy for users to navigate between Teams, finding everything organized in a consistent fashion.

Download the whitepaper today!