When Teams was first released for government customers, there was common resistance to deploying it.
Many customers had questions related to governance, sprawl and adoption. So, despite our enthusiasm for the product, many clients delayed their deployment of Teams.
In March 2020, organizations found that they were desperate for an application that could be used to facilitate enterprise communication and collaboration. That demand led many organizations to deploying Microsoft Teams. The application proved to be incredibly valuable to remote workers and the functionality was exactly what many organizations needed to stay productive.
Fast forward to November 17, 2021. Teams continues to be a critical application for many organizations. But, there are important questions that must be asked.
Are you using all the features of Teams, or are you still relying on GoToMeeting or Zoom for meetings?
If you are not using Teams for meetings, you may be missing out. Many organizations have investments in several meeting applications (Zoom, GoToMeeting, etc.) that can be replaced by the meeting functionality in Microsoft Teams. If you are using Teams but are not using the meeting features, we can help you in deploying this capability.
How do you handle the creation of new Teams?
By default, anyone can create Microsoft 365 groups. Microsoft recommends this approach since it allows users to start collaborating without having going to IT to have a collaboration site created.
Business standards are important and if your organization is concerned that non-compinat sites are being created, organizations should consider requiring users to complete a training course and then adding them to the group of allowed users.
Does your organization have a governance plan?
It is always best to start your move to Microsoft 365 with a clear vision. We work with clients to create a vision/roadmap for Microsoft 365 and help in the development of a governance plan. In order to develop a roadmap, we must understand the following –
- What are your key business goals?
- How will the tools and capabilities provide value to the organization as a whole and to individual employees?
- How will you measure success?
Do you have a process for deleting unused Teams?
Teams sprawl is an issue for many organizations. As an admin, you can use Microsoft 365 group expiration policy to automatically clean up unused teams. Because teams are backed by groups, group expiration policies automatically apply to teams as well.
If you apply an expiration policy to a team, a team owner receives a notification for team renewal 30 days, 15 days and 1 day before the team’s expiration date. When the team owner receives the notification, they can click Renew now in the settings to renew the team.
Maturity Roadmap
Kiefer’s teams of experts can help you in refining your use of Microsoft Teams, assist with remediation, or help you in doing more with Teams. We recently presented our project and program control solution on the Microsoft Power BI Community Call. This solution leverages Power BI, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to manage projects. We worked collaboratively with a client that wanted to interact with project data without leaving Teams. We helped them do that.
Kiefer sees Microsoft Teams as a unique solution that can connect users, make us less dependent upon e-mail, and offer better access to critical (and accurate) information. We can help you in determining where you are on the maturity roadmap and assist you in achieving your enterprise collaboration and communication goals with Microsoft Teams.