Forum Discussion
Custom O365 Provisioning Wizard - Worth it?
Yes and no. This really seems to come from the 2007-2010 world, we have all done this kind of solution. It may be truely superficial for you enrollment of new groups and sites and just for the sake to make a bit of money with some custom coding.
On the other hand some kind of provisioning tool/wirzard/younameit can help you from a governance perspective. Office 356 keeps the creation of new instances sometimes very simple and open to everyone. If you want to have a guided process and limit creation and governance of things to a specific process, this kind of automation could come in handy. How does your company want to govern the tenant? How "free" should your end users be in Office 365? And is there a master plan regarding the metadata perhaps?
Good thing is that with the existence of Office Dev P'n'P there is a solid basis where people can build their stuff with. No more custom code to the core or similar things. This makes these solutions often a bit better that they were several years ago.
So I share your scepticism but there might be good reasons to do such a wizard. Check the use cases your company has for enrollment, deployment, governance and complience.
Thank you for your thoughts Carsten! I by myself have implemented provisioning wizards in my past - perhaps the reason for my scepticism :D
One concern I have is that there are several places in O365 where to jump into Groups Creation. From Outlook, from Planner, from Teams, from the SharePoint Home and so on. How could we channel every user to our provisioning wizard? Can we channel them? As far as I know if we prohibit the creation of Groups for the general user an ugly error message pops up only stating "contact your administrator". Not a practical way in my opinion.
