December 20, 2021
|
5
min read

No doubt that collaboration solutions received a major boost when the pandemic hit, and employees moved from the office to their homes. Now, many corporations are bringing their workers back. Amidst the hubbub of activity, organizations have had trouble managing enterprise software. A strong license management system enables them to address such problems.

Corporations moved quickly to supply workers with the tools needed to work at home.

As a result, worldwide collaboration applications revenues grew to $22.6 billion in 2020, an increase of 32.9% over 2019, according to International Data Corp. (IDC).

Teams Usage Skyrockets

Microsoft Teams was a big part of that change. In November 2019, Microsoft proudly announced that Teams had 20 million daily active users (DAU). At the end of April 2021, Microsoft Teams reached 145 million daily active users. Then a few months later in August 2021, the vendor revealed the platform had more than 250 million monthly active users.

Due to reasons like working from home, the 2020 pandemic, and the continuation of digital transformation programs, Microsoft Teams’ growth records have been obliterated almost as soon as they have been published. The increases are coming in conjunction with the popularity of Microsoft 365, which established itself as a top enterprise productivity solution.

License Management Tools Lack Capabilities

Given the rapid ascension, businesses struggled to put tools in place to manage the growth. Departments have different needs, so the management tool needs to be flexible, but many today are quite rigid.

Another issue is Microsoft Teams license management information is scattered in a number of applications, making it difficult to collect, consolidate, and gauge trends. To gain needed visibility, often requires that organizations build bridges among different applications, exporting data from department spreadsheets, writing fragile PowerShell scripts, and then export the data into dashboards. With changes coming nonstop, enterprises struggle to maintain up-to-date information and often are a few steps behind their actual usage.

The end result is inefficiency. In some cases, businesses grant Teams business users system administer privileges. They are often not technology experts and make changes that open up to new security holes. In other cases, firms have too many licenses.

Regain Control with CoreView

How to solve the problem? Enter CoreSuite, which delivers the right access at the right time to the right person. Its Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) provides the ability to create custom roles and create individual or group permissions via an intuitive simple check-mark user interface.

With the Functional Access Control feature, administrators delegate permissions based on the activity. This capability empowers IT to hand system administration tasks to business unit managers. They

  • Provide human resources with the ability to update employee information
  • Empower legal, so it changes, enables, disables, and extends as needed
  • Grant local administrators the power to address issues and reduce unnecessary escalations

In this new motif, companies enhance system security. Permissions limit what parts of CoreSuite a delegated user sees. If they’re only administering Microsoft Teams, they just have Microsoft Teams reports and nothing else. This design prevents users from asking for permissions for items that are “grayed out.” They do even know they exist.

Automated routines reduce manual input dramatically. CoreSuite has hundreds of built-in management actions,

  • Report on nearly anything to do with a 365 instance
  • Take immediate action to resolve any issues you find, directly from CoreView
  • Generate reports across users, groups, Microsoft Teams, Exchange, OneDrive, licensing, and more
  • Send an email or initiate a workflow to address any issues
    • Pull up a list of Microsoft Teams Groups with no owners and either assign an owner or delete the groups
    • Filter enabled users based on the last login and disable any who haven’t logged on for a set number of days
    • Drill down on license usage and identify users who might be eligible for a lower-tier license (E5->E3, E3->F3)
    • Run a monthly report automatically that disables any account that hasn’t logged in for 30 days

Democratize PowerShell with Custom Actions

If a company needs more information, Custom Actions empowers them to build their own functions using PowerShell scripts. Once a Custom Action is approved, it immediately is available and can be run by any authorized user. These features can also be included in workflows, so if there’s a special function or lookup that needs to run, users create the action and the workflow executes it.

Finally, administrators gain access to run approved Custom Actions. They do not worry about PowerShell vulnerabilities or needing to grant full Global admin rights.

Microsoft Teams use has been growing at a breakneck pace. Consequently, many organizations have been managing their use reactively, in some cases opening up new security holes or having more capabilities than needed. With CoreView, they gain control and manage the growing collaboration solution much more effectively.

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Created by M365 experts, for M365 experts.