Microsoft Teams can be used for a variety of purposes. The user cases are many and, as usual, it's usually just the imagination that sets the limits of creativity.
Today's new technology has a high degree of self-service and when new functionality is rolling out at an ever increasing rate, it is often easy to forget how to enable end-users to take advantage of the new functionality.
Having good documentation about managing personal data is becoming increasingly important, not least in terms of GDPR. You also need to plan how to inform the end users in the most efficient and educational ways about news and changes in order to succeed with user adoption. Not least, it is important, as a "service responsible", to keep up to date with new functionality to take advantage of the services that make the most of the organization's needs, requirements and goals. These points, in my opinion, are advantageously mentioned in context of Office 365 Governance.
In this post, I will show how to set up a Team to get started with Office 365 Governance in the easiest way possible.
I start by setting up a Team and configure the Channels and their tabs.
The channel "General"
Under the General channel (which, by definition, should contain general information) I do the following:
- Rename the default wiki-page to "About" and enter information about purpose, usage and responsibility.
- Create the tab "Office 365 Governance Plan" and link it to the "general governance plan", which in short terms describes my company's governance of Office 365 and the included services.
- Create the tab "Roadmap" that is linked to the Office 365 Roadmap
- Create the tab "Responsibility" and link it to a custom SharePoint list (in the teams SharePoint site). Here I enter the services and the name of the persons that are responsible for each service.
- Create the tab "Usage" and link it to a Power BI-report that displays a great overview of the usage and user adoption by product/services.
The channel "Activity alerts"
I create a Channel and call it Activity alerts. This channel I use to capture "general" (not related to a specific service) alerts from the Security and Compliance center. This may, for example, be if someone has deleted a user or if any administrator has been granted extended privileges. I copy the channel's email address and enter it on the alert I set up in the Security and Compliance Center under Activity Alerts. In this way, I do not have to log in as Global Administrator to get an overview of the general alerts I set up. However, to see details, I have to log in.
The channel "Change"
If I do not exercise Change Management "by the book" I should at least have a simple process to keep track of changes and news so that I have the ability to plan for the introduction of them.
I create the channel "Change". Under the channel I do the following:
- Create the tab "Process" and link it to a PowerPoint that describes the process in a simple way. This gives me a visual overview of what to do.
- Create the tab "Plan" and link it to a Planner in which I have created one bucket per sub-process of the change process. By using this I can keep track of all activities we have to perform in order to plan the implementation of the function.
- Create the tab "Meetings" and link it to the Group Calendar. Her we get an overview of the upcoming change meetings.
The channel (Service)
For each channel that belongs to a service I capture service-related alerts from the Security and Compliance center. This may, for example in the Channel for Microsoft Teams, be if someone has deleted a Team. I copy the channel's email address and enter it on the alert I set up in the Security and Compliance Center under Activity Alerts. In this way, I do not have to log in as Global Administrator to get an overview of the Service-related alerts I set up. However, to see details, I have to log in
Under the channel for Microsoft Teams I do the following:
- Create the tab "Governance Plan" and link it to my Governance Plan for Microsoft Teams. Her we get an overview of the settings we have implemented and our policies and guidelines and how we handle creation of new teams, backup and restore etc.
- Create the tab "Roadmap" and connect it to the Office 365 Roadmap which I have filtered to show only information about Microsoft Teams. By doing this I (and/or the service responsible) do not have to see all news for all services in Office 365, instead he/she sees what is relevant for him/her.
Other
Each service (Teams, SharePoint, Yammer etc.) should have its own channel that contains tabs for Roadmap filtered on the service, Governance Plan for the Service and the service-related activity alerts should be set up for each service.
The governance plans, of the various services, and their content and disposition are something that you can and should establish based on the parameters that are important for your company to control.
This post is not the answer to how everyone should manage Office 365 Governance but I hope it gave you something useful that you can take advantage of if you wish to get started with basic governance for Office 365.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please comment on the post or send me a message.
/Magnus
