Introduction

Microsoft 365 is an empowering technology that has improved significantly in the last ten years of innovation. To meet modern needs of tech savvy organizations, it brought many enhancements in the critical areas of communication, collaboration, security, and automation, especially after the onset of flexible work culture. That’s why, the prices of Microsoft 365 products spiked drastically recently.

To overcome over expenditure in this regard, businesses need to tap into the opportunities that may bring significant cost savings and maintain a higher ROI. One of the efficient ways to mitigate unnecessary IT expenses is to optimize Microsoft 365 license usage.

Furthermore, in this article, we will learn a few tips to lower cost with Microsoft 365 and increase value. Let’s begin:

• Know the right use of M365

Cost of licenses varies as per the subscription level. With higher subscription tier such as E5 comes additional apps, and services that incur higher costs. Some users barely use all features bundled in E5. Hence, to cut down financial waste, organizations must thoroughly examine if a user really needs advanced features available in the subscription .

• Generate a license usage report

By generating license usage report, you can catch crucial insights into license types being utilized by your organization. You can easily discover inactive, under-utilized, oversized, and unallocated licenses and determine actions to avoid excess costs such as removing license from inactive users, downgrading the license plan for optimum use, reallocating unused licenses from deleted users, etc. Using usage report, you can determine your teams license requirements and choose a plan that best suits their role.

• Simplify management

Automating system updates can help reduce IT management costs by up to 40 percent and time spent on device management by as much as 25 percent. Also, by reduce device management cost and optimizing IT administration, you can improve IT efficiencies for new devices, apps, and infrastructure and simplify onboarding with automated provisioning.

• Empower users by raising security

Enabling a Zero Trust security model gives you the opportunity to reduce data breach risk by as much as 50 percent and overall IAM security management time by as much as 50 percent. Empower your digital workforce by giving them flexibility to securely work from anywhere, lessen data breaches and protect identities, devices, apps, and data. Reduce security costs with pre-consolidated identity, endpoint management, and security solutions to advance zero-trust architecture.

• Automate processes using governance solution

Maximize your savings on Microsoft 365 by reaping full potential of the technology using automated governance software such as TeamsHub.io. Centralize admin console, streamline processes, perform regular audits and enhance visibility of your tenant with end-to-end monitoring. Get a holistic view of your M365 environment and glean real-time insights into critical data and user collaboration experiences. Keep track of individual licenses, user activities, and M365 usage effortlessly via smart dashboard.

Summary

Businesses need to know that by optimizing the usage and efficiently handling licenses and subscriptions by leveraging automation, they can easily reduce the impact of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on their budget without compromising on productivity.

For more information on cost saving opportunities for Microsoft 365, please visit our main site at https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com for a demo

Introduction

If you are an organization with hundreds of thousands of teams in your environment, you ought to provide a fantastic search experience to your users for better adoption of Microsoft Teams. Sadly, Microsoft Teams doesn’t allow you to narrow down your search based on as many attributes as you want. For example, what if a user wants to find teams with a particular member holding a specific tag?

We know that ignoring governance in Microsoft Teams may lead to teams sprawl which subsequently generates findability issues. Hence, enhancing search capability is an important consideration for Microsoft Teams governance. You want to ensure that your platform is easy to use and navigate where users always find what they are looking for. To fulfill this requirement, our software TeamsHub.io introduces smarter ways to find teams. We have integrated advanced filters to streamline your search and render high-quality matches in your results.

Enhance discoverability with TeamsHub.io

The smart search engine in TeamsHub.io is designed to deliver faster and accurate results in real-time. Let us learn how searching information using TeamsHub.io is super easy and takes user experience to next level –

Improve your search experience with better UI

Make a lasting impression on your teams by providing them an engaging interface. TeamsHub.io’s dashboard is easy to use and navigate. Since many users access the software using mobile and handheld devices other than laptops and desktops, we have ensured that search bar is appropriately located on the screen along with advanced filters option to make it visually and functionally appealing.

Dig into granular details with advanced filter options

Besides basic search criteria such as team name, description tag, sensitivity labels, etc., you can use advanced filters in TeamsHub.io to refine your search. You can combine different attributes of your customized teams/sites and form a search query. Using this extensive search feature, you can eliminate the need to perform multiple searches in a single session and allow users to groupify their favorite teams/sites and reach out to them effortlessly.

Summary

TeamsHub.io ensures that searching is an awesome experience for you. Gain control over your searches and get what you want in no time. If you are looking forward to make your searches straightforward, TeamsHub.io is a perfect tool for you.

For more information on TeamsHub.io, please visit our main site at https://teamshub.io or our blog for more articles.

Introduction

Though Microsoft Teams is a perfect collaboration hub for your teams, yet you need to consider solutions that may inspire your teams to use the platform Typically, users need to understand the workflows synchronized with multiple Microsoft 365 apps bundled together with Teams. Wouldn’t it be nice to see your users jump to their tasks right away without having to go through tedious training methods?

We believe that streamlining business processes by automating workflows in Microsoft Teams will make adoption easier by taking user experience to next level and make them more productive. Additionally, you can get rid of arduous administrative tasks which involves complex configuration management across the tenant. As some operations in Teams can not be performed without using PowerShell scripts, automation need no prior experience in this module. Not even that, you can do many different things on Teams which Microsoft doesn’t offer.

Let us explore a few automation ideas to simplify Teams along with its benefits:

• Streamline approval-based system

This is done by simplifying team creation process by providing a request form to users which must go through an approval system by a group of administrators. Once validated and verified, a team comes into existence dedicated for a project.

Benefit: An automated approval system collects team’s details according to set criteria and sends them over to approvers for validation. This process ensures that no team in the tenant must be designed without a purpose which otherwise may lead to team sprawl and other security issues.

“TeamsHub.io offers a dynamic form for businesses to customize user request as per their mandates along with multi-level approval system to promote greater transparency.“

• Manage lifecycle

Automating Teams lifecycle management gives you the opportunity to have a greater control over your workspace. You do not want your Teams platform to get overcrowded with junk. Automated archival or disposal of teams after a specified time helps remove productivity hurdles and seamless management of teams.

Benefits: Individual management of teams is highly inefficient when done manually. Automation allows administrator to gain clear visibility of teams, organize teams better through all phases namely – creation, operation, and termination and optimize digital resources in your tenant.

“Using TeamsHub.io you can manage a multitude of Microsoft 365 workloads such as Teams, SharePoint sites and Yammer groups from a single dashboard. You can use pre-defined templates, activate site provisioning service, configure expiry dates, schedule auto-inactivation/auto-delete for workloads and enjoy many more advanced capabilities to boost performance of your platform.“

• Get important reminders

Using automation, you can synchronize email workflows during site provisioning and lifecycle management of teams. You can design pre-built email templates and make them as interactive as possible to promote user engagement.  

Benefits: Sending automated notifications or alerts is an excellent way to raise awareness among teams. Such notifications and alerts ensure that an action is taken after a critical event.

“TeamsHub.io offers you a unified overview of your M365 environment and can help visualize everything with real-time notifications and updates through a powerful dashboard and analytics stream.”

• Track shared documents

Automate Teams to view document changes and track every file that is shared among multiple collaborators in and out of your platform.

Benefit: Monitoring files in Teams especially when they are exchanged with external users help securing your platform against information loss or theft by any means.

“TeamsHub.io provides clear visibility into teams, guests and resources involved in collaboration and allows administrators to monitor externally shared files from a centralized dashboard without handling complex navigations, performing context switches, or using PowerShell scripts.“

• Enable logging and monitoring

Use automation to retain Microsoft 365 data and raise application performance by diagnosing records to discover bad incidents. You can track changes in application such as modified system settings, learn application behaviour and catch unexpected errors using logs.

Benefits: Automation improves the security posture by incorporating risk management framework. It improves response time by addressing the issue faster, enables quick threat detection and detects unwanted state of application without manual intervention.

“TeamsHub.io integrates effective log management to collect logs from different sources in your environment and provides you vital insights for auditing and performance. It uses real-time analytics for end-to-end monitoring of your tenant for enhanced security and informed decision making.”

• Protect business-critical data

Streamline Teams backup and recovery as a line of defence for optimum data protection. As Microsoft Teams does not provide any feature to back up your company’s data except retention policies, you can automate full recovery of Microsoft 365 data and prevent unexpected data loss during an outage.

Benefits: Automation allows you to overcome inconsistent and irregular backups due to manual practices which increase data loss risks. You can store your sensitive data for length of time and recover whenever you need.

“Use TeamsHub.io’s smart backup management system for faster backup and point in time recovery of Teams and SharePoint Online data. This modern backup feature comes with an intuitive UI where you have flexible backup and restore options to manage M365 data effectively in the cloud. Additionally, with automated scheduling, you can create backups in a consistent manner and minimize manual efforts.”

TeamsHub.io is an automated governance software which extends Microsoft Teams capabilities to empower your workforce and make them more productive.

For more information on leveraging automation to Microsoft Teams, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com for a demo

Introduction

In the digital world today, information is exchanged at an enormous rate via collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams. As remote teams collaborate continually, a huge volume of sensitive data flows outside the corporate perimeter. As it stores more and more data in the cloud, how can businesses ensure it remains safe and is restored without hassle in case of loss?

Does Microsoft Teams allow secure backup?

Data loss is unpredictable and as it is said that prevention is better than cure, so is data resilience against risking value. This demands data backup which is one the critical data security practices for enterprises. Sadly, Microsoft Teams does not have a conventional backup system except its native retention policies. According to Microsoft’s shared responsibility model, tech businesses must use their own tools to protect their data.

The complex data architecture of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams stores its data in multiple locations including SharePoint libraries, OneDrive and Exchange mailboxes. All files that are shared in a team are stored in its associated SharePoint site whereas all that are shared via chat or meeting are stored in OneDrive or SharePoint library.

Let us have a quick look to different data types in Microsoft Teams:

1. 1:1 chat, group chat -> These messages are saved in user mailboxes
2. Channel messages -> These messages are saved in group mailboxes
3. Voicemail and call summary -> They are stored in user mailboxes
4. Channel and chat meeting recordings -> They are stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business
5. Files -> Files shared in teams channels are stored in SharePoint Online whereas those shared in chats are stored in OneDrive for Business
6. Web pages -> Wiki is a default web page created for every team stored in document library ‘Teams Wiki Data’ in SharePoint Online site
7. OneNote -> OneNote is a default notebook created for every team channel and is stored in document library ‘Site Assets’ in SharePoint Online site

Microsoft Teams data retention

As Microsoft Teams is tightly integrated with different Microsoft 365 apps, you should consider which data component you want to secure. Remember, you can’t create backup copies of your Teams data but can only retain it for a period of time before it is permanently deleted.

You can secure your data in the following three ways:

• For SharePoint Online/OneDrive –
  • Use native data retention for SharePoint Online/OneDrive which offers 2 levels of recycle bin functionality with a 93-day retention period
  • You can also use file versioning enabling which in a list or library, you can store, track, and restore items in a list and files in a library whenever they change. Versioning, combined with other settings, such as checkout, gives you control of the content posted on your site. You can also use versioning to view or restore an old version of a list or library
  • If lots of your SharePoint or Microsoft Teams files get deleted, overwritten, corrupted, or infected by malware, you can restore an entire shared document library to a previous time. The restore will undo all the actions that occurred on both files and folders in the last 30 days
  • Deleted SharePoint sites are retained for 93 days. After 93 days, sites and all their content and settings are permanently deleted, including lists, libraries, pages, and any subsites

• For Microsoft Teams – Use compliance retention policies in Microsoft Teams to force file retention for an indefinite period
• Third-party backup solution – Select a third party back solution to enable restoring Teams data

Teams backup with third-party tool

As we now know that Teams data is dispersed across multiple Microsoft 365 storage locations, you need a robust recovery tool in place to secure your corporate data. A third-party backup tool is an easiest approach to back up your data beyond Teams’ native capabilities. We advise you to opt for an automated backup solution that limits your downtime and perform restorations in minutes!

What Does Automatic Backup Mean?

Typically, manual backup is a tedious and time-consuming process with other setbacks. Here, one needs to maintain complex configurations in a large environment like Microsoft 365 regularly which makes it unreliable and prone to errors. Unlike manual backup, automatic backup doesn’t involve human intervention. It automates and simplifies entire backup process and enables faster recovery.

Comprehensive backup & restore solution by TeamsHub.io

TeamsHub.io is a third-party governance software for Microsoft Teams which offers automated backup & restore feature with matchless benefits. Using TeamsHub.io, you can eliminate multi step procedure of storing and retrieving data, improve consistency and maintain compliance. This modern solution lets you –

1. Enjoy advanced recovery capabilities for not just Microsoft Teams but also for SharePoint Online data
2. Perform backup and restore operations from an intuitive dashboard that needs no training
3. Store them for any length of time and recover whenever you need
4. Create backup of files, tabs & conversations including chats, emoticons, stickers, memes, and GIFs from team channels
5. Enable container-level backup for your Teams and SharePoint Online site document libraries, subsites, site templates and other site assets
6. Save multiple versions of your work through file versioning
7. Set a recurrence schedule to initiate backup operation automatically at regular intervals
8. Create multiple backup copies or containers of a team or site which is already backed up
9. Recover critical items on granular level such as files, list items, sites, subsites, metadata, contacts, email accounts, attachments and more in two clicks

Conclusion

Data protection is one of the dire needs of businesses for their sustenance today. With ever-increasing risks of data loss and breaches, an effective data backup strategy must be in place to cope up the situation. Such as the times of uncertainty as this, a third-party backup tool is worth the investment.

If Microsoft Teams is your central communication hub, we would highly recommend using TeamsHub.io for faster backup and point in time recovery so that you can have a peace of mind when your teams collaborate. Ensure high reliability, flexible usage, and effective management of M365 data backed up in the cloud with automated backup operations and meet your recoverability objectives seamlessly.

For more information on automated backup and recovery using TeamsHub.io, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com for a demo

Introduction

It is vital for Teams users to stay informed about important updates to ensure quick actions. Using task-oriented notifications for critical events enhances collaboration by alerting users that something needs their attention or needs to be done.

In this article, we will learn about different ways to send notifications in Microsoft Teams. Later, we will discuss how automated notifications can streamline communication to enhance it and increase engagement. Let us begin:

Defining notifications in MS Teams

• Urgent notification

If there’s an urgent issue that requires immediate attention, a notification like SMS text, push notification, or high priority Teams message should be used so the notification is immediately noticed.

• Informational or actionable notification

Informational notifications are to notify users, but they’re for information purposes only. For example, you can post a message in a Teams channel notifying people that a new idea has been created.

Actionable notifications enable one or more follow-up activities by the recipient. For example, if the notification requires user to do something with the notification, such as accept or reject, you should use an actionable notification using an adaptive card technique or hyperlink.

• Personal or group notification

Sometimes IT stakeholders should be notified about events or incidents that need responses such as approvals or remediation. For personal notifications, consider sending a message, email, or text message so that other users aren’t overloaded with non-applicable notifications. If the message should be seen by multiple people in a group, a post in a Teams channel is a better choice, as the users in the group can all see the message and collaborate on it.

• Schedule notification

There is no way to schedule notifications or emails for users. Using Microsoft Outlook, you can delay a message but that works only if Outlook is open. So, a better option is to use Power Automate to trigger a flow and schedule reminder emails for your users.

Are Teams notifications sufficient?

If you are an administrator, you know that generating notifications for various use cases in Microsoft Teams is inefficient and unreliable. With limited options in Microsoft Teams and based on your administrative workloads, you may find it frustrating to create tasks that are repetitive. While governing features such as Site Provisioning and Lifecycle Management, you need additional tools to synchronize email workflows with your collaboration platform. Hence, we advise you to top-up Microsoft Teams using our automated governance software and level-up user engagement and communication experience.

Use automated notifications & collaborate faster with TeamsHub.io

Automated notifications are a great way to maintain awareness during collaboration activities. It provides a consistent way to help teams stay on top of their projects.

TeamsHub.io offers you a unified overview of your M365 environment and can help visualize everything with real-time notifications and updates through a powerful dashboard and analytics stream.

Let us see how automated notifications in TeamsHub.io improves performance –

1. Your users can easily track all activities from one place instead of switching through apps or services to find out where action is required. Timely alerts enable users to take action right away without unnecessary clicks.
2. You can customize messages including emails, newsletters, and alerts and automate schedule and send periodic notifications, announcements, etc., to all users or specific group of users.
3. You can manage different site provisioning notifications such as request submission/approved/success/failure, join request to private/public team, and so on for both, users and administrators in a couple of clicks.
4. You can use adaptive cards for generating interactive emails and proactive lifecycle notifications and allow users to take action right from within emails for faster response.

Conclusion

Notifications get complicated fast when you manage end-to-end governance in your Teams ecosystem. TeamsHub.io gives you full control over notification management so that your key stakeholders get notified at the right time. With 100% visibility on critical information, users can take quick decisions and forestall a crisis. Besides, TeamsHub.io gives endless possibilities to your teams to collaborate effectively and deliver successful projects.

For more information on managing notifications using TeamsHub.io, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com for a demo

Introduction

A Microsoft Teams team goes through three different phases in its lifecycle – Creation, Operational and Termination. Let us understand each of these phases in detail –

Three phases in lifecycle of a team

Phase 1: Creation of Teams workspace

In this phase, we create a collaboration workspace and identify the purpose or goal of a team. It starts with a proper planning which answers the questions like –

1. Which project is the team created for?
2. Which channels, tabs, or apps will it include?
3. Who will be the owner(s) and member(s) of the team?

Once your planning is done, you must consider the following attributes for your workspace –

1. Classification of teams based on the confidentiality levels and categorization of teams based on location, department, and project
2. Defining templates for a consistent structure of collaboration workspace which includes channels, tabs, apps, SharePoint site architecture, etc.
3. Enforcing naming conventions to avoid duplication of teams
4. Creation of a team request form and approval workflow for verification and security
5. Configuration of external collaboration settings to allow external or guest users to collaborate with your teams

Phase 2: Operational phase

This phase involves the evolution of a team where it makes progress towards its goal. A team goes through many changes in its lifecycle and hence it requires a thorough management and monitoring. In this phase, an administrator must consider the following pointers to properly govern the Teams environment:

1. Check if teams are compliant and following the security best practices
2. Ensure that the teams were rightly utilized as per their privacy status and visibility
3. Identify if there is any modification in the member list such as change in the role or addition or removal of a team member.
4. Monitor teams collaborating with guest users and track files exchanged with them
5. Find whether teams have downloaded third-party apps and verify if those apps are authorized or not
6. Detect inactive, outdated, and orphaned teams in the environment to free-up the resources

Phase 3: Termination

The phase of termination refers to the expiration of teams that have served their purpose. It is to ensure that teams release all critical resources at the end of their lifecycle, and the Teams environment does not get overcrowded with junk. You must remove all teams that are not useful anymore from the system which otherwise may hamper the productivity and performance of the platform. However, it is advisable to keep or archive those teams that might work in the future. Importantly, you must also remove external users at the end of collaboration in this phase.

While some are short-lived and some are long, there is a lot to watch out for as long as teams exist. Manual management of teams is not just hectic but an inefficient process which can easily fall through cracks. Applying loads of policy settings to and monitoring every individual team without fail is unrealistic and may wear administrator down.

Why TeamsHub.io is every administrator’s choice

Now, let us see how automated lifecycle management by TeamsHub.io changes administrator’s experience:

• Centralized governance console

Our idea is to make governance fuss-free for administrators. TeamsHub.io intelligently unifies all governance modules from Microsoft Teams in an aesthetically designed interface in a central location. Administrator gains clarity while end-to-end monitoring and management of teams which elevates user experience and increases productivity.

• Dynamic form for team request submission

With TeamsHub.io, you can customize team request form by adding columns as per your business mandates. This allows you to collect team details including metadata for better content discoverability and records management.

• Automated way to identify purpose

Using an approval workflow, you can verify team details and accept or reject the requests based on company guidelines. You can even configure multi-level approval system to increase transparency and security in the platform.

• Control over Teams workspace

Overlapping and duplication of workspaces is the most common problem that users face in Microsoft Teams. TeamsHub.io fixes this issue by automating naming conventions which allows users to create team with a unique name. This promotes better organization of teams and discoverability of relevant information that users may look for.

• Easy detection inactive or irrelevant teams

It’s easy to grab teams’ status and all activities that are taking place in your environment via a powerful dashboard. Forget about manual aggregation and crunching of data, TeamsHub.io’s automated reporting and analytics feature enables you to visualize every granular detail in your platform that Microsoft Teams doesn’t offer.

• Actionable insights into what’s working and what’s not

Effectively gauge all collaboration activities, use of digital assets and exchange of information within and outside of teams. TeamsHub.io provides automated management for external users so that you can easily track who is accessing what in a team and revoke the usage if necessary.

• Get notified for critical changes and actions

Never miss an event where your input as an administrator is a must. Customize workflow email notification to allow flexibility in communication. Receive instant notifications for a team review, request approval, membership changes, team usage, and so on. Also receive lifecycle notifications as actionable messages for faster information workflow.

• Simplified lifecycle management

TeamsHub.io allows you to define clear policies for successful management of Teams teams and other Microsoft 365 workloads. Set multiple priority levels to submit different policies where each specifies a condition for a workload to match. TeamsHub.io assigns policies to workload(s) automatically if they satisfy a certain condition as per business rules.

For more information on Teams lifecycle management, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com for a demo

Introduction

Managing Microsoft Teams workspace efficiently is central to robust governance and successful collaboration. Where freedom to create teams drives engagement, an endless existence of teams obstructs the platform to perform its best. This necessitates defining lifecycle for teams which involves their management from creation to archiving and deletion. Lifecycle management in Microsoft Teams is useful to prevent disorderliness in the platform, teams sprawl, intertwined workspaces, duplicate content, poor visibility and more.

Further in this article, we will guide you through some useful ways to prevent lifecycle management issues in Microsoft Teams followed by an automated solution to overcome the same. Let us begin:

Steps to avoid lifecycle management issues

Before you roll out Microsoft Teams in your organization, you must take necessary steps to allow an uninterrupted adoption, as given below:

• Know the purpose of each team

It is important to know the purpose for which team is created for better governance. IT department must verify the project a team serves and estimate the duration for which it is going to occupy the digital resources. Once the purpose of a team is clear, member list can be sorted.

• Propose a guideline to control an outgrowth

To control proliferation, it is recommended to set a provisioning service for team creation. Decide if you want all users or only specific groups of users to create a team. Let an approval process be in place as a guardrail to collect teams’ information and metadata as per business mandates. This allows you to verify and add only useful teams to keep the environment healthy.

• Enforce teams nomenclature

Sadly, Microsoft Teams cannot identify duplicate workspaces if created with the same name. Hence, you must configure proper naming convention otherwise it may lead to confusion and make it challenging for team members to find the right content.

• Rule out inactive users

It is advisable to continue monitoring your collaboration platform to detect if any user in the list is no longer required. This is to avoid security issues such as data leakage or data misuse. You must remove those who have left your organization or are not a participant in a team anymore. Also, you must remove external users who have stopped collaborating.

• Prevent orphaned teams

Team owners are responsible for administering their teams. Since absence of an owner impacts the productivity of all team members, an ownerless team cannot thrive. So, it’s best to have at least two owners in a team so that if one of them leaves the team or organization for some reason, it continues to function ideally.

• Consider decommissioning phase

Keep a close watch on teams to identify those that are sitting idle in your environment or are unused for some time. Such teams are called inactive teams. You must consult the owners of such teams to find out if their purpose is fulfilled. You must delete the teams that are no longer required and consider archiving those that will continue to work in future. Doing so will help optimize the resources and avoid mishandling of teams by users.

• Implement retention policies

Configuring retention policies ensures that critical data of your organization is not lost but can be restored if accidentally deleted. Doing so will help you retrieve information from a deleted team and recover old items which you used once while collaboration.

Avoid lifecycle management pitfalls using TeamsHub.io

Configuring all lifecycle management policies from and within Microsoft Teams is helpful only if you have a limited teams in your organization. To manage a multitude of teams, you need a better platform that can enable you to work smarter. Hence, we proudly introduce you to our automated governance software called TeamsHub.io which allows you to manage all your teams from a single place effortlessly. Believe it or not, you can govern and monitor your teams in just a couple of clicks no matter which stage of lifecycle they are in. With TeamsHub.io you can –

• Design your own templates to avoid rework and maintain unique design and consistency in your platform
• Use site provisioning feature to activate self-service to enable users create teams under organization’s guardrails
• Apply naming conventions automatically when a user creates a team
• Customize user request form to grab additional details as per your compliance mandates
• Verify teams’ data via an approval system for better transparency and security
• Track all activities across teams like information sharing among team members and external parties using smart analytics
• Set expiry date for teams and schedule automated notifications for the same
• Find best performing teams, inactive teams, archived teams and orphaned teams through powerful dashboard
• Configure auto-inactive, auto-archive and auto-delete functionalities according to given timelines to avoid inaction
• Simplify lifecycle management of teams by setting various policies under multiple priority levels

Are you ready to let TeamsHub.io automate your Teams lifecycle management?

We are committed to help you manage your Teams lifecycle with our automated governance engine so that you can experience an unparalleled collaboration.

For more information on Teams lifecycle management, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com for a demo

Introduction

An approval workflow is a logical sequence of actions which needs human approval to process the request. In approval workflow, after submission, a request can only proceed after it is verified and approved by approver(s) set by your organization.

Where manual management of approvals cause potential delays and disorderliness, automated approval workflows provide opportunity to minimize errors and increase transparency while evaluating the processes.

In this article, we will learn about the common components of an efficient approval system followed by its benefits.

What does an automated approval workflow entail?

Let’s take a quick look at some important steps required to create a streamlined approval workflow in an application –

1. Site submission: Firstly, activate self-service site creation to promote flexibility and user engagement. Next, provide users with a request form to fill in essential site details as per your business mandates. Collect metadata for better governance and to boost adoption.
2. Assigning approvers: Here, you can delegate the responsibility to your critical stakeholders to become approvers. You can configure multiple levels for specific fields of the request form and multiple approvers on each level to assess compliance with rules. At least one approver on each level must approve the request before it can be reviewed by the next level of approvers.
3. Timelines: You can set expectations by configuring deadlines and due dates for approval processes to avoid unnecessary delays and promote smoother workflows.
4. Automatic alerts/notifications: You can enable automation alerts and email notifications according to your preference. It is used to notify approvers on the status of the approval process. It informs approvers about various stages of a request till its completion. Also, it lets a requester know that their form has been approved or denied.
5. Logs to review history: Here you need to validate and update the request to fix issues that occurred during the request provision process by checking all actions from the start using error logs.

Advantages of streamlined approval workflow

An automated approval workflow makes the process of governance easier and simpler in following ways –

• Accuracy

A team/site comes into existence only after multiple approvers review and sign off a form after their approval. This ensures that the data is verified and accurate which leaves no room for errors.

• Efficiency

Different approvers in an automated approval workflow can review the form effectively without having to worry about sending the request to next level of approval. With notifications and alerts, approvers can easily access the forms and approve instantly without waiting around.

• Transparency

With greater visibility into each approval action, you can easily track the status of a request and identify if there is any bottleneck or discrepancies in the process. This makes the critical stakeholders accountable for their work and reduces the chances of falsity or slowed performances.

• Operational efficiency

You can achieve greater operational efficiency with automated approval workflows as it won’t stop if your employees are on sick or on holiday leaves. All processes are so mapped in the system that other team members can take over the processes quickly.

• Governance

A streamlined approval process is regulated to help meet compliance and regulation standards. You can execute audit trails and instantly provide reports as required. By catching actionable insights into the data, you can understand the performance of the processes and make informed decisions to improve them.

Level up your approval workflow with TeamsHub.io

For organizations collaborating on Microsoft Teams, automating processes can greatly enhance IT efficiency and productivity. Standardizing complex approval structure allows you to get rid of clunky manual processes and speed up request management. With a myriad of benefits coming your way, we would want you to transform your platform using TeamsHub.io’s automated workflow engine and see the benefits for yourself!

To know more about Teamshub.io, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com 

Introduction

The external sharing capability in Microsoft Teams allows you to connect and collaborate with your clients, customers or vendors who are not part of your team or organization. You can share almost all resources with them including teams, channels, sites, etc., or limit them to simply chat or meet with you or view your files.

To enable external collaboration in Microsoft Teams, you need to configure the sharing controls across Azure Active Directory, Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and SharePoint to allow the level of sharing that you want for your organization.

To set an environment apt for collaboration with external parties, you need to adjust and customize many external sharing features for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive to ensure corporate data is shared responsibly.

Let’s have a brief look on the steps required to enable external collaboration in your tenant:

1. Configure settings in the portal

External collaboration settings let you specify what roles in your organization can invite external users for B2B collaboration. These settings also include options for allowing or blocking specific domains, and options for restricting what external guest users can see in your Azure AD directory. The following options are available:

• Determine guest user access – From here, you can restrict what external guest users can see in your Azure AD directory.
• Specify who can invite guests – From here, you can limit the ability to send invitations by turning invitations on or off for everyone, or limit invitations to certain roles.
• Allow or block domains – You can use collaboration restrictions to allow or deny invitations to the domains you specify.

2. Add guest users in Azure AD

First, you need to sign in to Azure portal as Global administrator, Guest, inviter, or User administrator and add guest user in the Azure Active Directory.

After you add a user you can also assign them to a group, or give them access to an app in your organization.

3. Govern guest access in Microsoft Teams

Once you’ve added a user in the Azure AD portal, that user will also be listed on the guest users page in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Guest access enables collaboration with external users by adding them as guests to your organization’s Azure AD. Guest access enables external users to have broad access to corporate data and applications beyond Teams channels. External users will have to switch tenants to collaborate in Teams in other organizations. Bringing a guest into Teams allows them to have access to private channels they’re invited to and all standard channels in the team.

4. Govern guest access in Microsoft 365 groups

By default, guest access for Microsoft 365 groups is turned on for your organization. Admins can control whether to allow guest access to groups for their whole organization or for individual groups. When it’s turned on, group members can invite guests to a Microsoft 365 group through Outlook on Web. Invitations are sent to the group owner for approval. Once approved, the guest is added to the directory and the group.

Guest access in groups is often used as part of a broader scenario that includes SharePoint or Teams. These services have their own guest sharing settings.

To collaborate with guests across documents, tasks, and conversations, Microsoft Teams provides all of the collaboration features available in Office and SharePoint with persistent chat and a customizable and extensible set of collaboration tools.

While the basic sharing features can be configured to require people outside your organization to authenticate, Microsoft 365 provides many additional security and compliance features to help you protect your data and maintain your governance policies while sharing externally. You can implement additional safeguards to help protect your content from accidental or intentional inappropriate sharing.

5. Govern guest access in SharePoint and OneDrive

SharePoint administrators have many settings available for collaboration. Organization-wide settings are managed from the SharePoint admin center. Settings can be adjusted for each SharePoint site. You should keep your organization-wide settings at your minimum necessary security levels and increase security on specific sites as needed. For example, for a high-risk project, you may want to restrict users to certain domains, and disable the ability of members to invite guests.

After enabling SharePoint and OneDrive integration with Azure AD B2B, you can share of files, folders, list items, document libraries and sites with people outside your organization. This feature provides an upgraded experience from the existing secure external sharing recipient experience. External Sharing can be set for both SharePoint and OneDrive. OneDrive restrictions can’t be more permissive than the SharePoint settings.

Why consider automation for external collaboration

Certainly, setting up external collaboration in Microsoft 365 is a tough row to hoe. From the productivity point of view, external collaboration is a huge advantage to a business while from the administrative point of view, it is a ton of manual work under a governance framework.

Besides, configuring controls and various other settings via multiple admin centers, Microsoft Teams provides no way to actively monitor shared data. Managing and maintaining external users or guests in Microsoft Teams is highly inefficient as it engages IT teams in additional work. With this regard, automating external user management is an excellent way to raise the security of the platform and boost the performance of your teams.

Automate external user management using TeamsHub.io

Thankfully, TeasHub.io provides a flexible and secure way to manage your external access and makes it fit for sharing organizational data. Using automation, it weaves multitude of features to manage external collaboration for different apps like Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive at both team and tenant level from a unified interface. Administrators do not need to struggle anymore aggregating data from different admin panels. Managing permissions and restrictions for every user accurately in an automated environment leads to a great user experience and enhances productivity.

TeamsHub.io provides clear visibility into teams, guests and resources involved in collaboration and allows administrators to monitor externally shared files with ease. No complex navigations; no context switching; no PowerShell scripting. TeamsHub.io streamlines complex administration processes, simplifying tasks to eliminate unnecessary and arduous steps for empowering users. To sum up, TeamsHub.io is a comprehensive solution for external collaboration management and all other governance needs.

To know more about external collaboration management and other governance features in Teamshub.io, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com 

Introduction

To make teams collaborate flexibly and securely in Microsoft Teams, there is an unbelievable amount of administrative work that goes on behind the scenes. We know that without robust governance, Teams can quickly spin out of control, especially when teams outgrow in number. Consecutively, platform gets bound to data spillage and becomes vulnerable to cyber risks. This is when tasks like configuration management and regular monitoring of the platform gain paramount importance.

Typically, the issue of teams sprawling and mismanagement is triggered during team creation wherein Microsoft Teams allows anyone to create team by default. To prevent this situation, administrators must establish controls and govern platform relentlessly. However, managing and maintaining the platform manually is highly inefficient and demands better solution.

Let’s take a quick look to common IT challenges related to team/site provisioning in Microsoft Teams –

• Difficulty in organizing teams when users create teams with different naming conventions
• Challenges in controlling team proliferation that occurs due duplicate team creation and overlapping of workspaces
• Inability to search, sort and filter content which user is actively looking for
• Lack of visibility and security protocols during external collaboration
• Inefficient ways to configure user role, permission, approval workflows

Using Site Provisioning in TeamsHub.io for effective governance

To discard negative impacts of no or poor governance in Microsoft Teams, many organizations prefer disabling site creation feature. But we refuse to do so to avoid low adoption and bad experience.

Reading further in this article, you will know how Site Provisioning capability in TeamsHub.io keeps team/site creation under organizational guardrails in place and ensures organization meets all compliance standards.

Using site provisioning functionality, you can bring the entire provisioning process in control and prevent unintended chaos by –

a) Lifecycle management of teams, sites, and Yammer groups to eradicate the cluttered experience in Teams.

b) An approval-based system to streamline the process.

c) Access management to delegate rights and permissions to specific users to explore and use digital resources

d) Flexible approach to support different levels of external collaboration and manage guests and domains

TeamsHub.io simplifies the Team creation process by leveraging the power of automation to give you a code-free experience. A centralized console allows administrator to configure and manage myriad of features effortlessly without navigating to multiple admin panels.

Automate provisioning using TeamsHub.io

TeamsHub.io automates approval and provisioning to amplify platform performance beyond native capabilities of Microsoft Teams. Automated process eliminate the need of manually configuring workspace creation whenever end-users need them. Once the administrator activates self-service feature, it automatically provisions team/site creation for end-users within organizational guardrails. This helps administrator to save a surprising amount of time and focus on tasks that matter most.

With TeamsHub.io, you can amplify your tenant performance by –

1. Activating self-service provisioning of new teams while asking for additional metadata to allow administrative control
2. Allowing creation of custom site types
3. Using pre-defined and customizable templates to keep consistent structure and navigation
4. Enhancing search and filtering capabilities of teams by using the provided metadata
5. Enabling guest access request at the time of request submission
6. Customizing request form with flexible columns as per business requirements
7. Establishing policies to avoid creation of ownerless teams
8. Setting multi-level approval for greater transparency and accuracy
9. Tracking progress of user request and manage request lifecycle

Conclusion

We as collaboration experts understand that the in-house maintenance of the Microsoft 365 platform because of its complex architecture can be tough. If you are a large organization seeking a right governance solution for varied collaboration needs, consider Teamshub.io as a one-stop shop to revolutionize Microsoft 365 platform and maximize investment.

To know more about Teamshub.io, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo