Have you ever had the experience of providing users a document management system or Sharepoint site only to find that everyone uses it differently, creates folders all over the place in different ways, stores documents differently and after six months time it’s so hard to find anything that it defeats the purpose for which it was implemented in the first place? What a nightmare! You’re not alone.

With Microsoft Teams quickly becoming a preferred collaboration tool, you’d be forgiven for having fears of this nightmare becoming a reality all over again. The primary reason for that is there’s no technical ‘silver-bullet’ to prevent this from happening, it’s more of a governance discussion. Notwithstanding, there are some things you can do on a technical level that can help.

There are basically four levels of administration to be considered:

• Global Settings – There are a number of features and functionality for Teams that can be turned on or off at a global level and these should be risk assessed for each environment. Ideally this should be done before the first Team site is even created.
• Team creation – Microsoft Teams, while based off Office 365 Groups, will also provision a Sharepoint site for each Team. Therefore the decision as to who should be creating Teams is the same as for who should be creating Groups and Sites. One approach that we’ve found works well is to have these functions centrally managed with Teams created on request. There is of course an admin overhead to be considered however. See below;
• Team Owners – These are the users that really run the individual Teams and will have the best insight as to the value of the Team and how it should be used. Trying to run this centrally is likely to lead to frustration all round so once created, administration should really be handed over to the Team owners. They can then add Team members, assign roles, create Channels and enable Apps etc as they see fit.
• Team Users – Obvious statement but these are the ones who should be seeing value in Teams collaboration. Paradoxically one way to dilute that is by being in too many Teams. Users shouldn’t be confused about what spaces they should be collaborating in or where to store documents etc. To prevent this, ideally Teams should have clearly defined functions, whether that be organisational, operational or project based collaboration. Confusion arises where these functions overlap between Teams so clear delineation is important. This is another reason centrally managing Team creation can work well. In larger environments implementing practices like naming standards for Teams will also be of value.

Some of the central administration technical considerations are outlined here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/enable-features-office-365

Melissa Hubbard also provides some useful considerations in her blog post on the topic and while it’s a little while ago now, it’s still a great starter for some of the governance considerations:  https://melihubb.com/2017/07/25/microsoft-teams-governance-planning-guide

If Microsoft Teams is on your agenda for implementation, be sure to reach out to the Adexis team who can assist with design and implementation and help you to provide this wonderful platform to your users to enable communication and efficient collaboration, without the admin headaches.