)ffice 365 Groups Governance and Controls

[Tami Shaw]

When will Microsoft give some control to Global Admins for O365 Groups? The digital debris could be astonishing. We've disabled Planner and are running a script to disable Groups on our tenant, even the ones created with the new Team sites. However, I can see that this is a short term solution. For companies with a governance structure and limited capabilities for change management, the lack of admin control is a big oversight. I think that compliance and administration should be where the design teams start instead of it being an after thought. 

Don't mean to be a downer but sometimes the reactive mode on things this far sweeping creates more work than the enhancement you're pushing out adds value. 

[#2]

digital debris 

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I'm totally gonna steal this phrase

+1 to everything you said though, i've been screaming the same thing forever.  

I'd rather see a model that when you create a Group, you can "turn off" and "turn on" the features that you need/want.  And groups should be able to be applied to anything and everything else.  (like......ya know....permission groups).

If you have strict governance, then spin up groups (with everything turned off) and apply them to the resources created as part of your processes.

I feel that the concept of "shadow it" was overblown and led to this model

[#3]

I couldn't agree more Brent. Also glad to hear that I'm not alone in my experience.

[#4]

I think for now, any governance required is going to be in our responsability and sid...maybe in the future Microsoft will provide some kind of controls or whatever to simplify how we can have Groups and all the related stuff under control cc @Christophe Fiessinger

[#5]

Tami thanks for the feedback. What specific controls are you looking for please?
What are your concerns with users leveraging Planner to get work done?
Is your organization familiar with how groups fits in our overall collaboration value in Office 365?
These upcoming Microsoft Ignite session might be of interest: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/1238 & https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/1331

[#6]

Absolutely agree.  We are a large organization and need to evaluate all new services for security and compliance issues, at a minimum.  Plus, I've seen new services rolled out as a free preview (PowerBI) and then have a huge price tag applied when it is no longer preview.  (I worry this will happen to PowerApps and Flow very soon.)

If we encouraged our users to take advantage of every tool, then we'd open ourselves up to potentially critical business processes built on preview tools that we have no budget to pay for. (Is this Microsoft's idea of adoption?)

The story has gotten much better in the last few years, especially when admins have the option to disable/block new features prior to them being rolled out.  However, there are holes in that as well -- Planner is a good example of a bad rollout.  We've disabled planner via the license mechanism, but it is still easily accessible to anyone in our organization by going to tasks.office.com.  They can even sign in with their organizational account.  Is that license check merely to "hide" the icon in the apps launcher? (lame)

[#7]

Kelly since Planner is available at no additional cost, what's the concern about using it for task management? With 80% of employees admit to using non-approved SaaS apps in their jobs, (Stratecast, 2013) it's a fine line between turning capabilities off and encouraging shadow IT. What I've noticed talking to customers or here at MS is that employees have less and less patience to wait for a solution to their problem and will pick their phone and find an alternative after a while...

[#8]

Hi Christophe - That's right, we don't want to encourage shadow IT, but we also can't endorse services that don't meet our compliance and security concerns.

However, I think you're missing the point -- why give us the option to simply make the Planner icon disappear?  If our employees can use their organizational credentials to log into the planner service, store company data there, without IT knowledge/approval/controls in place, then why call it part of Office 365? Is this an enterprise solution or not?

IMHO, it is nonsensical to give IT a "fake off switch".

[#9]

Good feedback for my Planner colleagues: @Eray Chou @Brian-Smith

[#10]

@Christophe Fiessinger

I work with many enterprise clients and they all have the same issue as it relates to Governance in Planner, Groups and Teams. In the Enterprise admins need to know what data is stored where so that they can support:

• Possible future migrations. I know MS doesn't see a time when a customer would move from their platform but Enterprise admins must consider this
• A Users takes advantage of Groups, Planner, Teams and creates a good business critical system and then leaves the company. How is the Enterprise Admin going to find that and assign another owner after they leave? If the Admin can't see this group or know that it is there how is this not Shadow IT just in another solution?
• Clean up of old content. Neither Planner, Groups nor Teams allows for content expiration or deletion. One of the core practices we put in place for clients is Site Disposition after an expiration date. This keeps old stale content out of search and reduces the scope of any eDiscovery scenario. To my knowledge not all content from these systems are exposed through search. Also, it does not seem possible to add additional metadata to these Sites / Portals to assist users in their ability to discover them in search

Your statements above are that these features are good and that admins should release them to the Enterprise. I agree they are all Awesome! And I could not be more excited about using them, but you will not see large scale adoption in the Enterprise until you provide those tasked with the protection and management of the Enterprise's data the tools to govern the data that will reside in these systems.