In this article on Microsoft Teams governance for enterprises, we’ll go over everything that makes this platform such a great fit for enterprise communications and discuss the best ways to create a governance plan that takes care of both lifecycle management and security compliance for Microsoft Teams.
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Microsoft Teams is an end-to-end business communications platform that helps enterprise workers collaborate internally and externally.
If your organization is an existing user of Office 365, Azure, or Intune, it only makes sense to choose a communications app that’s part of the same cloud ecosystem and integrates seamlessly with other applications within the same package.
But it’s not just a matter of convenience! The sheer amount of enhancements and extensions available on Microsoft Teams is enough to prove it a worthy business collaboration tool in its own right.
However, as with any communications platform, the privacy and security of your business and employees have to take center stage.
Microsoft Teams has everything you’ll ever need to ensure the safety of your sensitive data and team members. But, it needs to be configured appropriately to use the right governance policies that are most suited to your workspace.
Let’s start by discussing some of Microsoft Teams’ best features going from 2022 into 2023. What makes it such a great fit for enterprise organizations?
Microsoft Teams is a massive platform that stands quite well in its own right, but the star of the show is still the seamless integration it offers to create a unified workflow with other Microsoft products like Excel, OneDrive, SharePoint, PowerPoint, and Word.
You can just hop in with your coworkers and collaborate in real time on any of these platforms, which is exactly the kind of freedom you need when you’re working with a large team tackling multiple priorities at any point in time.
That said, there’s plenty more to unpack here. Let’s start by going over some of the latest and best additions to Microsoft Teams:
All of this is just scratching the surface. You can also build your own company knowledge base inside Microsoft Teams, create a better hybrid workplace with Microsoft Places, and much more.
As with any other type of enterprise software, Microsoft Teams requires a certain amount of initial setup to get started. The first order of business is to configure the various permissions and policies available in the platform to play well with your organization.
But governance isn’t a one-time process. You must also adapt your policies to any changes within your organization and monitor for deviations to your company baseline.
CoreView helps you automate your governance process and provides end-to-end lifecycle management for Microsoft Teams. However, before we delve into how automation can help you simplify your team administration duties, let’s take a look at a few best practices to follow:
A proper naming convention ensures consistency across your organization and a much better user experience for the end user.
You can create teams based on projects, tasks, departments, and hierarchies to make it easier for team members to collaborate. Then, use these key characteristics to create a team name that reflects what each team is about.
Team Owners are user accounts with administrative capabilities in Microsoft Teams. They can remove members, manage guest access, and define certain team-specific settings.
Without a proper strategy to define ownership, you risk many problems including losing access to certain teams when an employee is on leave or having duplicate teams creating chaos within your organization. As a standard practice, define a minimum of three owners per every new team you create.
In Teams, meeting policies help you define the features that remain accessible to team members and guest users during video conferences and team webinars.
By creating a set of default policies for your teams, you can alter their meeting experience and define rules for how they engage with one another. For example, if you want to limit the amount of bandwidth that a meeting uses, just create a policy that disables content sharing.
You can use app permissions in Teams to determine if a specific internal or third-party app should be available for use within your organization. You can also restrict user access to specific applications using app permissions.
Microsoft normally pulls your app settings from Admin Center to use as the default template in Microsoft Teams. But you can change these settings by creating a custom policy.
Microsoft Teams allows you to create custom messaging policies to determine what features are available to each team or user group.
For example, control whether someone can edit existing messages, delete ones that are already sent, or receive read receipt notifications for one-on-one conversations. An org-wide policy is created by default, which you can customize by creating your own policies.
For a complete list of Microsoft Teams best practices across access and sharing, app management, content, and more, read Essential Guide to Microsoft Teams Governance.
Are you struggling to maintain multiple tenants and larger teams within your enterprise in Microsoft Teams?
Going through screen after screen as you create endless policies to micromanage different settings can get tiresome really fast. It’s also terrible for e-discovery since you have no way of tracking the changes you’ve made and monitoring deviations caused by interference from other users in your organization.
CoreView Configuration Manager, Simeon Cloud, is a complete configuration management solution for Microsoft 365 that helps you automate the entire governance process for Microsoft Teams. With a baseline configuration with security and compliance best practices to get you started, it helps you make changes and monitor deviations across your organization through a centralized portal.
But, CoreView's prowess extends far beyond Microsoft Teams. You can use the same portal to back up your configurations, automate lifecycle management, manage provisioning, and package applications across multiple tenants throughout Microsoft 365.
Want to learn more about how CoreView can help your organization improve its governance strategy for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365? Sign up for a demo to learn more!
