Microsoft Teams is relatively new to the Office 365 collaboration family but is quickly becoming a leader in enterprise collaboration apps. It brings together the best parts of Office 365 in a single tool, and supports extensions for integration with non-Microsoft services. With Teams, you can easily connect to applications such as Trello and Zendesk, or transfer chat conversations into email with the click of a button.
While Teams features provide flexibility and a one-stop-shop digital communication solution, the abundance of options can be confusing for an out-of-the-box implementation.
By default, MS Teams gives everyone in your organization the ability to create a team, add content and invite external users. For IT professionals, this is a blessing in terms of easy adoption, but can cause an influx of clutter if your internal orgs aren’t adhering to any rhyme or reason in organization and usage.
Before opening the floodgates, best practice suggests to set guardrails in place that help avoid future issues such as the creation of unnecessary teams and inefficient collaboration. It also makes it easier to stay in control of permissions and external collaboration before things get out-of-hand.
3 Considerations for a Successful Implementation
As you plan, ask yourself the following questions:
– How do I want MS Teams to be used across my organization?
Are you encouraging collaboration through channel conversations and knowledge sharing, or would you rather focus on one-to-one conversations?
– What do I want a team lifecycle to look like?
How long should a team be inactive before you decide to archive or delete it?
How many owners should be assigned in order to avoid orphan teams?
– Who should have permission to view, create or collaborate across my MS Teams?
Which domains get a greenlight to access your platform?
Should certain teams have external users whitelisted? How do you determine when to revoke guest access?
A well-implemented Teams solution should have a proactive strategy that takes the above considerations into account and makes sense for the structure of your organization. This strategy can then be iterated on, as you gather insights into your team’s Teams usage and adoption.
Need help mastering your MS Teams deployment and ensuring governance? Tryane Analytics for MS Teams can give you detailed insights into your users’ adoption, engagement and preferences, while helping you govern and stay in control.