I am probably a member of and have access to hundreds of teams. Some teams are located in my organization’s tenant, and there I am either the owner or a member of these teams. Some teams exist in other organizations and then I am invited as a guest in them. You might now be thinking that it must be messy and stressful to be a member of so many Teams? The answer to that question is, as so often, “it depends”. What it depends on is whether you have good settings and a good structure in your teams or not.

As a guest in other organizations’ teams, you usually (and preferably) do not have control over the team’s settings and structure, it is usually up to the owners of the respective teams.
My own teams in my own organization, however, I can (and should) have a good structure, here I myself am in control of my teams and their settings. In order to, subsequently, get a good overall structure in Microsoft Teams, it is important to start with the teams themselves. (We will get to the rest in a future blog post in this blog series.)

A familiar scenario – Team Chaos

If you’ve been using Microsoft Teams for a while and you haven’t made any restrictions in your organization so far, all your users can create teams how they want and when they want.

This will inevitably (or probably already has) cause team chaos in your organization.

• You have – or will have – lots of teams with different names and purposes.
• You will have several teams that could actually be one and the same team.
• You will have teams without owners.
• You will have teams where you do not have an overview of who in the organization has the right to see the files stored in the various private or public teams.

This scenario is a reality in many organizations today. To say the least, you have poor control over collaboration, information structure and security.

Now this blog post is not about Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, but I still have to point out that if you recognize yourself in the above description, you have a job to do in connection with becoming “Copilot Ready” or “Copilot optimized” (beloved child has many names).

How to avoid- or fix it

Start by establishing a good naming standard and the right settings on your teams. The best way to, from the start, get a good control over your teams is that with the help of Power Platform you use Power Apps and Power Automate to build a Power App for ordering new Teams.

Using the ordering app, all of your users must order teams through a controlled process. Thanks to this controlled process via the ordering app, you can achieve a number of advantages.

• Everyone who orders new teams does so via the ordering app. This way you can have clear information and help texts that help users understand what type of Team they should set up and what basic security settings apply to it.
• The number of team types is limited to a number of standardized team types that apply to your entire organization. This means that it becomes more intuitive and easy both to create new teams and to find existing teams. These team types can be, for example:
  • Internal project team
  • External project team
  • Internal collaboration team
  • External collaboration team
  • Department team
• The ordering app ensures that based on which team type is selected in the order form, each team gets a clear prefix. This means that it becomes easy to distinguish what type of team it is and thus it becomes easier for you to get an overview of your teams and it also becomes easier for your Team administrators when they want an overview of your total team environment.
• The ordering app also ensures that there are always at least two owners for each team. This reduces the risk of your organization being left with a number of orphaned teams in the event that you or one of your colleagues is absent for an extended period of time or quits the job.
• The ordering app can also, based on the selected team type, ensure that the team gets the right Privacy setting from the start, i.e. whether the team should be “Private” or “Public”.
• In the best of all worlds (which you should of course strive for), the ordering app can also be configured so that each team that is created receives a sensitivity label via Microsoft Purview Information Protection and that you thus have control over which Teams you should be able to invite guests to and with setting standard labels on the SharePoint site that belongs to the team. (We will talk more about this topic in another blog post).

All users should be allowed to create new Teams, but for ordering certain types of Teams you may want an approval function. You can solve this by having the ordering app’s Power Automate flow, for certain selected team types, require approval by sending an Adaptive Card to an Approver before the team is established.

Via the ordering app, you can also specify which Member permissions should be valid for each team type.

Most of the time, you want the team’s owner to be the one to decide which channels are to be set up and which apps are to be used in the team. If all members of the team have full rights to do this, then you quickly get chaos in the team (and in other teams as well). This should therefore be taken care of by the ordering app when setting up the team.

Summary

With the above in place, you have laid the foundations to get a good structure on all your Teams in your organization. In the next blog post in this series, we will take a closer look at how to create a good information structure within the teams themselves. Here, Team channels will be the main theme.