Microsoft Teams Governance Simplifies Adoption Across M365

Any organization getting started with Microsoft Teams, or that has deployed MS Teams, quickly recognizes the critical importance of having a governance plan for this rapidly engaging collaboration tool. With the rush to facilitate remote work, businesses have been scrambling to catch up with procedures that help maintain control.

But more significantly, running the tool without governance at all is what becomes problematic, quickly dealing with issues like unwieldy teams and sites sprawl.

Image: Orchestry's Intelligent Governance in Microsoft Teams

Simple, Unified Hassle-Free MS Teams Governance

Businesses often fluctuate between tight control and ad-hoc self-service when it comes to digital transformation. Both heavy MS Teams governance policies and giving free rein to users create bottlenecks throughout the adoption funnel. It can be hard to find the right balance between the two extremes and even harder to maintain that equilibrium.

This is where Orchestry fits in, delivering empowering governance tools to drive adoption and usage with simplified workflows. The Orchestry platform enables IT administrators, to maintain adequate control without imposing too many restrictions on users, hence, maintaining a fine balance.

It is all about managing the creation of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and SharePoint Online Sites through a single interface with Orchestry. The many capabilities that you have access to include custom approval processes, naming conventions, custom metadata, email, and platform notifications, end-to-end provisioning lifecycle management, and more.

Why is Teams Governance So Important?

Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Sites are tools that are prone to unwieldy sprawl due to the free and dynamic nature of collaboration. Whilst Microsoft provides many capabilities and features to help reign in common issues like content duplication, sprawl, and findability often organizations require additional capabilities.

Orchestry’s governance abilities allow you to set rules around the creation of teams and sites, which in turn controls any unnecessary provisioning. Not to mention, because of transparent governance strategies, users are aware of existing groups, teams, and sites, which prevents any duplication of assets, further keeping heavy sprawl in check.

Microsoft Teams governance with Orchestry is not all about controlling sprawl but also about allowing end-users some degree of self-service and access that drives both Microsoft Teams adoption and engagement with the Microsoft environment. A unique feature of Orchestry is end-user Workspace customization during the request process allowing users to get exactly what they need in line with any policies or rules that the organization needs to adhere to.

Empowering Through MS Teams Governance

Orchestry’s Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams governance offers intuitive features for both end-users and administrators. You can monitor and control how users request Microsoft Teams teams, SharePoint sites, Microsoft Groups, and more. Furthermore, custom approval processes enable self-service requests and defined workflows to be easily reviewed, modified, and approved by the administrators.

Image: Orchestry Workspace Provisioning with Custom Approval Workflow Governance

Naming conventions are crucial to consistency, discoverability, and findability across the organization. The group naming convention enabled through Orchestry is simple and uncomplicated whilst being very powerful. You can tailor it to suit your organization and even block words for naming Microsoft Teams teams and SharePoint sites without needing additional Azure AD Premium licenses. Orchestry allows you to control the name of the Microsoft Team, the underlying Group, and the SharePoint site URL.

Image: Orchestry Workspace Naming Policy

Not only that, users can incorporate custom metadata in Workspace requests. You can add your own metadata to Orchestry and then use that metadata through the request process to capture important information and categorize this content to expose it within the Workspace Directory feature.

Image: Orchestry Workspace Management with Custom Metadata Governance

Orchestry also provides the ability to specify a minimum set of owners and members for each Workspace request so that one major issue related to Teams can be avoided – orphaned Teams with no owners. In addition to minimum owners and members, Orchestry can also define default owners and members for a template. This allows an organization to completely control who is an owner of a Workspace to drive consistency. For example, you can easily define that every Project Workspace has your PMO as an owner.

The most sought-after ability is end-to-end Provisioning Lifecycle Management. Through this, the interface allows you visibility to manage, track progress, and check compliance for all requests. 

Transparent Microsoft 365 Governance

As you may have read with us before, all of Orchestry’s core capabilities are tied together and complement each other in delivering a simplified Microsoft 365 experience to all users. You have access to a complete suite of features that maintain consistency across the platform.

The Workspace Template capability utilizes governance policies every step of the way and these policies can be customized according to each Workspace Template type. Administrators can control every aspect of a Workspace including privacy, naming, approvals, SharePoint sharing options, Group options, and many other capabilities. All of these features are easy to configure and intuitive for end-users.

Image: Setting up An Approval Workflow for Orchestry Microsoft 365 Workspace Provisioning

Workspace Provisioning is a core capability that is linked with transparent governance capabilities in Orchestry from beginning to end. Governance with Orchestry allows you to manage the complete lifecycle of a Workspace. From requesting a Workspace to managing the existing MS Teams teams, SharePoint Online sites and/or Microsoft 365 Groups Orchestry has you covered.

With Orchestry’s Governance capability, IT administrators are no longer overworked as there are fewer hurdles along the way for users. Transparency and streamlined policies take the pressure off admins while enabling users to engage with tools like MS Teams, and SharePoint Online without too many restrictions. 

Orchestry is an all-in-one change management solution that is business-centric and focused on simplifying the adoption and usage of Microsoft 365 and its many toolsets.