In today’s world and the current corporate situation numerous enterprises have rolled out Microsoft Teams as a tool to improve collaboration, communicate effectively and manage their workforce remotely. The ease of use of using Microsoft Teams has resulted in incredible user adoption and perforation content stored in Microsoft Teams.

In this series of blogs, I will discuss the different aspects of rolling out MS Teams, managing them through their lifecycle and leveraging the best industry practices to ensure that you get the maximum ROI from your Microsoft Teams deployments.

The first key process in any enterprise that needs to be implemented to manage the Microsoft Teams deployment is how Microsoft Teams can be created or deleted. We will therefore cover that process and aspect here. By default, when Microsoft Teams access, creation and usage is turned on for all licensed users in your tenant. If you do not put guard rails around who can create and manage teams, people in your enterprise will ultimately end up with a mushroom cloud of Microsoft Teams with content spread across silos, no naming conventions or standards and users will struggle with finding relevant content within a very short period, leading to decreased productivity, end-user frustration and ultimately a poorly adopted solution.

Microsoft Power Platform has evolved into an established and comprehensive platform, and organizations using SharePoint Online workflows, can switch over to the Power Platform and have the same functionality available to them.

The next question that would naturally flow is well if we lock down the tenant and not allow users to create Microsoft Teams, we will need to provide a mechanism to let users request teams, manage team templates, and retire teams as well.

The most naturally evident business process automation tool is Microsoft PowerApps and Power Automate.

1. Run a script to prevent users from creating new Microsoft Teams.
2. Create an application using MS PowerApps to allow users to submit requests for new Microsoft Teams.
3. Create an approval process using Power Automate to process the requests.
4. Create an Azure Automation job to provision new teams based upon approval on the incoming request.
5. Create templates within your enterprise to provision new teams
6. Create a process to retire unused teams.

In the next blog, I will cover step 1 on how to design and publish our application to allow registered users in the enterprise to submit their requests. If you need more details, please feel free to connect with me at sales@cambaycs.com

Aqeel Haider

Vice President - Technology