How to control sprawl in Microsoft Teams

Introduction

Granting autonomy to users for workplace collaboration using MS Teams platform is certainly a promising idea to raise organic adoption. But the downside of it can’t be neglected if there is no plan for streamline governance for a better user experience.

What is Teams Sprawl?

When a multitude of users keep creating teams, you may end up having dead teams, empty channels, duplicate teams due to inconsistent naming, content scattered over chats, channels, and files spread all over in your Teams ecosystem.

And over the course of time, it gets frustrating for users to search for the information they need. This compels them to find alternatives, the impact of which defiles business value by decelerating adoption as well as productivity.

Major pitfalls of MS Teams Sprawl

In a nutshell, an inadvertent growth of teams in large organizations may lead to the following consequences:

• A decline in user adoption
• Increase in outdated or stale content
• Shadow IT and rise in insecure endpoints
• Risks of data exposure and theft

Prevent MS Teams Sprawl using TeamsHub.io

To overcome MS Teams sprawl, one needs to think of an intelligent way to streamline Teams creation. Thankfully, TeamsHub.io has excellent features to prevent the potential collaborative mess in MS Teams while increasing overall productivity levels. Let’s discuss them one by one:

1. Set up MS Teams provisioning without curtailing user freedom

TeamsHub.io automates self-service provisioning for end-users while establishing a dynamic approval system for a new team request. Hence, instead of restricting users to create teams, you can let them make the right choices when creating a team.

2. Manage the lifecycle of Teams to enhance visibility

Using TeamsHub.io, you can automate the lifecycle management of teams by configuring expiration policies. This way, you can keep all teams in service, archive them if they are idle for restoring them later, or delete them permanently to free up all the resources linked to them.

3. Follow Teams nomenclature to avoid duplication and clarify the purpose

TeamsHub.io lets you enforce naming conventions to teams and groups so that you can have non-identical teams created for unique purposes. This further helps in searching and sorting the teams without confusion.

4. Enforce governance policies to disable Teams creation without owners

TeamsHub.io allows you to set a minimum owner policy while creating teams. This way, it ensures that you have teams with at least one owner who has special permissions to manage the team and it’s content throughout its lifecycle.

5. Use analytics to catch insights into the growth of Teams

TeamsHub.io offers you real-time reports to uncover the status of all teams in your organization in a glance. You can visualize the number of owners and members and other resources attached to teams. This way, you can easily detect if all teams are active and take corrective actions when an anomaly is found.

Summary

Teams Sprawl is one of the most prominent challenges that most organizations face after an overwhelming rate of adoption of MS Teams. To overcome this, TeamsHub.io, with a control structure of rules and policies, strikes the right balance between governance and usability to ensure you deliver an unparalleled user experience.

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