In our conversations with organisations during the Covid-19 crisis, one thing has become clear; they have all had to rapidly accelerate projects which enable modern ways of working.
Remote access to company data, intranets, cloud collaboration tools and virtual meetings became a necessity overnight.
For many organisations, the risk of deploying these solutions without the usual planning and governance was not a comfortable decision to make, but it had to be weighed up against the potential cost of doing nothing. As a result, many organisations switched on tools within Microsoft 365 without fully understanding the future impact.
You only have to look at the stats (now over 75 million daily users!) for Microsoft Teams to understand how rapidly it has been adopted by organisations forced to adapt to the ‘new normal’. Once an organisation has deployed a transformational tool such as Teams it is nearly impossible to remove (not that we think many people will want to).
Several months on we think it is now a good opportunity for organisations to make time to review their current Teams deployment and take steps to ensure that the decisions they were forced to take will not have any negative consequences going forward.
At Dapt we recommend that organisations retrospectively review their environment to ensure that they follow best practice advice from Microsoft and avoid the common pitfalls that can impact the future use and adoption of Teams.
Getting back in control
We think that by using the following approach customers can stay in control of their Microsoft Teams environment:
Ensure that Team creation is governed and implement a request process to avoid uncontrolled sprawl of Teams
Implement processes to manage the lifecycle of Teams and clean up any that are unused
Ensure that the security features available in Teams such as DLP, labelling, retention, guest access have been implemented or correctly configured
Train users, Team owners and administrators so that they can use and manage Teams and unlock its full potential
Look at ways to extend the functionality of Teams through Apps, Connectors, Bots, Power Platform and other tools to increase productivity
Template Team designs to ensure a consistent approach across your organisation
If you would like to speak to one of our Microsoft Teams experts please get in touch.