The down side of Microsoft Teams: why you need governance

In recent years the move to remote working has seen the use of Microsoft Teams grow exponentially. Microsoft Teams plays a critical role in the communication and collaboration of many organisations and along with increased usage, comes increased volumes of documents stored within a SharePoint environment.

Teams and channels can quickly propagate. While this makes collaboration easy for users, it also has negative results such as:

• increased risk of inappropriate disclosure of confidential information
• creation of orphan and ghost teams with no active owners or users
• creation of redundant, outdated and trivial teams and documents
• duplicated teams and documents
• overwhelmed users with membership to too many teams
• creation of an environment unmanageable by IT.

It is important to introduce a governance approach for Microsoft Teams to help reduce these risks and challenges and enable the organisation to manage teams and their content throughout their entire lifecycle.

A good governance approach will result in the following benefits:

• encourage collaboration in a way that can be managed by the organisation
• effectively manage the risk of sprawl
• reduce the number of redundant, outdated and unused teams and documents
• make it easy for users to find information they need
• ensure information is appropriately protected

Talk to Breadcrumb Digital about how to establish and implement governance for Microsoft Teams.