Microsoft Teams Provisioning and Governance
As announced at Ignite, Microsoft Teams is the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history. Over 300,000 organisations now use Microsoft Teams as part of their Office 365 deployment. There are however a number of Governance challenges with Microsoft Teams. Also, there is a clear requirement for Microsoft Teams provisioning. This is because organisations struggle with controlling who can create Teams. Also, what settings are enabled and also how Teams link to SharePoint Sites.
At ProvisionPoint we get asked regularly about the creation and management of Microsoft Teams. Therefore, ProvisionPoint is happy share our vision for improved governance with our first beta for Microsoft Teams provisioning.
Provisioning Microsoft Teams
In ProvisionPoint we wanted to support both options for how a new Team is created in Microsoft Teams. Firstly, an authorised user in ProvisionPoint can choose to request a new Team in the same way they can request a SharePoint Site or Office 365 Group.
Importantly only members of Active Directory Security Groups defined within ProvisionPoint will be able to request the Team. This gives control to administrators to easily restrict who can create a Microsoft Team.
An administrator will be able to define multiple types of Teams, each with their own configuration and settings. Furthermore, users may be restricted to only requesting one type Team.
The second way a Team can be created in ProvisionPoint will be through converting an existing Office 365 Group to a Microsoft Team. An administrator can enable an Action in ProvisionPoint. This action will allow an Owner of an Office 365 Group to convert it to a Microsoft Team.
There will be further granularity to define which Office 365 Groups can be converted to a Microsoft Team.
Configuring Microsoft Teams Provisioning
The Service Definition in ProvisionPoint will be the key building block for Microsoft Team provisioning. This is the same approach as used for SharePoint Sites and Office 365 Groups,. However there will be settings specific to Microsoft Teams.
In ProvisionPoint an Administrator will be able to configure a new Service Type of Microsoft Team.
In addition to the usual ProvisionPoint settings, there will be additional options related to how the Microsoft Team is provisioned and managed. It will be possible to define any Channels to include when a new Team is created. Furthermore, for each Channel created various setting can be defined. This include creating dynamic Initial Conversations.
The name of each Channel created can either be defined within the Service Definition. Otherwise it can be dynamic based on information the user provides when requesting the Team.
Within Microsoft Teams it is possible to change a number of settings once a Team has been created. In ProvisionPoint we will make those settings available to an administrator to define for any Teams created from a Service Definition.
ProvisionPoint will provide flexibility to an Administrator. This is because they will be able to set different settings to be applied to different types of Teams.
Other Features
Provisioning of Microsoft Teams will also support existing ProvisionPoint features, including
- Adding an Approval Process before the Team is created
- Notifications to Administrators or Business Owners when a Team is created
- Full configuration of the Modern SharePoint Team Site created with the Team
- Setting the Email Address of the Office 365 Group created with the Team
- Capturing organisation specific meta data when a new Team is created.
- Populating a Directory in SharePoint, including any meta data, for each Team which is created
- Ongoing Actions including Deletion of a Team
Next Steps
This initial post is to give an understanding of how ProvisionPoint can help organisations provision and improve the governance for Microsoft Teams. We are continuing to evolve our vision for Microsoft Teams by engaging with our customers and the MVP community. Please get in contact if you would like a demo of our Microsoft Teams provisioning capability or to join our beta programme.
[This post originally appeared at https://www.provisionpoint.com/microsoft-teams/microsoft-teams-provisioning-governance/]
