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What really matters in a Microsoft Teams Deployment? Can you just turn it on and see what happens? What if you were to figure it out along the way? What is Teams Sprawl and why do they refer to your Teams environment as the Wild West? I like to call it herding cats. There’s no reason to herd cats if you can keep your arms around your environment. In fact you can accomplish both good governance and user satisfaction at the same time.

1. Focused Teams Adoption and Champions Plan – End user confusion is not the thing to start with, but most Teams deployments will likely not be greenfield. There will be some previous environment even if you’re replacing Slack, Skype for Business, or moving data from SharePoint to be used in Teams. Start with a clear migration path, and a very strong community of champions in a pilot environment, DO NOT add confusion by staying in a persistent “islands mode” deployment where users are sent back and forth from Skype and Teams. Adoption is one of the most important keys to a successful environment with Teams. Users need a clear path on what to use when on both Collaboration, File sharing, Voice, and Apps.
2. Streamlined Provisioning & Lifecycle – Teams provisioning can be simple or a nightmare. You want a good balance of easy to obtain with light approval or to borrow from Nintex a “lazy” approval process where Teams can be auto or quickly approved. You absolutely need to avoid duplication and sprawl. On the back end when someone is done with a Team how does it get archived? What if it is needed later? You need to have a good Teams lifecycle strategy.
3. Classification & Unified Labeling Strategy with Hubs and Information Architecture – A trusted, structured and easy to use environment starts with good labels such as all external access teams being put into a Hub marked for external. Likewise internal HR Teams should be “Hubified” together into HR to allow search, design, and consistency. From both a management and compliance perspective keeping “like” things together will allow for improved auditing and compliance. It helps both IT and the Users in maintaining a clean, well managed and easy to use environment. Labeling for compliance will be much much easier when setup properly with AIP, DLP, policies, templates, retention and sensitivity labels. Information policies and further security policies can be enforced through good A good structure will support a “Unified Labeling” across Microsoft 365 driven by good governance and Information architecture in Teams.
4. Manage Sharing for External Files & Guest Access – A well managed environment makes it easy to track external file sharing in the right places. As well managing external guests either through white labeled domains or a process for managing and expiring both links and users. Ensure you have good processes and procedures for either automation or operations and reporting.
5. Quality Assurance for User Performance with Analytics and User Insights – You need to look beyond out of the box reports for ensuring Network and Call Quality. Early in the deployment you will see optimization that can be done. Don’t be quick to blame Microsoft as 90% of outages are often from Telco’s and network infrastructure that can be optimized. Even user device configuration can be optimized to ensure good performance. In the beginning this means focusing on the bottom 10% and then the bottom 1%, but do NOT ignore the user experience.
6. Teams as a Platform Application Management including full Power Platform Environments for Dev/Test/Staging (preproduction) and Production – While many would look at the policies in Teams and say it’s about either enabling or disabling apps for governance. I say Teams as a Platform is the goal. It is your job. If you’ve done governance and deployment well, you will find that a solid Teams deployment is one that embraces the Teams as a Platform mantra and looks to see how it can be matured to support “Environments.” Mature Teams environments that support business unit application development in pre production is a healthy way to support the growth of Teams inside your organization. Once your Teams becomes the hub of the company you’ll see how this is way more than deployment, but an investment in your company and where work gets done.

Come join me for 60 minutes on Teams Governance with Q&A. I’ll be diving into each of these 6 Keys to Successful Governance.

When: Wed, Apr 14, 2021 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT / 1PM EDT

Don’t miss the chance to attend the Microsoft Teams governance workshop by Joel Oleson, MVP
Attend this webinar to understand the key elements for streamlining governance using Teams and other Microsoft 365 workloads without compromising on end-user autonomy and IT control.

Please join me, Joel Oleson, MVP, Regional Director, and former Microsoft IT Architect in this free 1 hour webinar on Teams Governance hosted by TeamsHub by Cyclotron for insights and solutions to increase collaboration, productivity, innovation, and adoption for your Microsoft 365 investments.

>> Register now! <<