Top 6 Microsoft Teams Lifecycle Management Best Practices

Workplaces have modernized worldwide because of Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams makes communication and collaboration more efficient and seamless for organizations. However, if not deployed with forethought Microsoft Teams can deliver its own set of problems. To ensure productivity and optimum utilization of the tool, lifecycle management best practices must be established and executed.

Teams Governance: The Basics

Governance. We cringe when we hear that word, much less when we need to create a plan for it! Many of us are in the position of having rolled out Microsoft Teams quickly to meet the rapid movement to work from home in early 2020. It can feel overwhelming to try to wrap governance around a tool as popular as Teams in a way that won’t disrupt current work-streams.

Regardless of where you are in your journey with Microsoft Teams, its not too late to step through basic decisions that should be evaluated for Teams and create common sense governance for the organization.

Lessons Learned and Sleep Lost: Moving to the cloud the right way

The cloud has seen a HUGE amount of uptake from companies struggling to find ways to stay productive. "In-Premises" environments have transitioned to less active usage or have been slated for migration to cloud based alternatives.

As a consultant, this has given me the opportunity to work with a lot of customers lately to work on these changes and I have learned a few lessons.

Transitioning to the cloud quickly was a necessity for many, but there are bunch of skipped steps that need to be looked a, starting with Governance.
If your On-premises systems are still active, you may want to spend even MORE time monitoring them.
The Cloud is not less secure, bit it is different.

Real World Lesson On The Importance of Governance in Microsoft 365

This is my face when I read about the KPMG error deleting user’s private chats in Microsoft Teams. For those who aren't familiar with the KPMG story 145,000 of the global user personal Teams chats were deleted.

Keep Your Retention Policies Simple

When it comes to governance and retention policies, there seems to be this misunderstanding that the rules have to be complicated. The other day, I received an HR department's retention and destruction policy. Here's a small sample of it –

Your mother doesn’t work here! (A governance intervention)

Does your file share look like your teenager’s bedroom?

It’s ok – I already know the answer. I find that many organizations think they are alone in this issue and that everyone else probably has their file shares in order, their compliance in check, their security locked down. That’s really not the case. Sure, minimum guidelines are probably met and you are all doing the best you can do. The reality is, many organizations ARE in their teenage years, at least in terms of the Information Technology department. Overall you’ve done pretty well – gradual upgrades and advancement in IT have likely brought along support for automated business systems, mobile devices, and remote access. We’ve focused on moving towards new phone systems, voice over IP, screen sharing and conference calling with video. Things are pretty good! However as IT shifts into maturity, we are faced with yet another challenge and it’s likely the biggest one yet. As we move into this cloud based world where mobile access is paramount, suddenly we are faced with making decisions about our content. And we have a lot of it. Content may be most commonly defined as documents but can include the storage of any kind of intellectual properly like email, wiki libraries, social conversations, intranets, newsletters, etc. You may be asking -

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