Microsoft Teams Lifecycle Management: Key Governance Tips

Getting Started: Microsoft Teams Lifecycle Management and Governance

Effectively managing the lifecycle of teams within Microsoft Teams is crucial for preventing uncontrolled growth and ensuring the orderly management of your tenant. By setting clear governance policies, users can understand when and how they are allowed to create new teams or groups. This approach ties closely to a well-thought-out plan for lifecycle management in Microsoft Teams. Generally, there are two approaches to team creation: centralized and decentralized. Consider whether your IT department should manage all team creation or if users should have similar rights, taking into account factors like company size, security requirements, and desired control levels.

Standardization and Classification

Establish clear guidelines for naming conventions, team ownership, and team purposes. Define various team types with associated permission levels based on their sensitivity and purpose. The key to maintaining an organized Microsoft Teams environment is the implementation of permissions and governance:

1. Use Teams Templates: Pre-configure settings for different team types with corresponding permissions for channels, apps, and guest access. This streamlines creation and ensures consistent governance.
2. Hold Team Owners Accountable: Ensure team owners understand their responsibilities for the team’s purpose, members, and policy enforcement.
3. Utilize Microsoft 365 Groups: Integrate team creation with Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365 groups to manage user access and permissions effectively.
4. Set Retention Policies: Define how long teams and their content should remain active, and establish policies for archiving or deleting inactive teams.

Handling Inactive Teams and M365 Groups

To manage irrelevant or inactive teams, you must first identify signs of inactivity and decide whether such teams should be archived or removed. Establishing these policies helps reduce redundant information storage and mitigate potential security risks caused by an uncontrolled lifecycle within Microsoft Teams.

Identifying Inactive Teams or Groups

Signs of inactivity include no recent messaging activity, file uploads, or meetings. Microsoft 365 reports and audit logs can help pinpoint inactive groups. Set a timeframe for inactivity, commonly ranging from 30 days to several months. Encourage users to report unused teams or groups to administrators.

Lifecycle Management Strategies

An effective lifecycle management strategy is essential to avoid difficulties in finding teams or uncontrolled content growth. Plan each phase of a team’s lifecycle, from creation to archiving, to prevent these issues. A key aspect is having clear data retention guidelines based on legal and compliance requirements. Additionally, ensure users are informed about the closure of teams or groups to avoid confusion and maintain clarity on where to access relevant information. Depending on your needs, consider using automation tools like the Teams Manager app to identify inactive teams, send reminders to team owners, and apply lifecycle policies automatically.

End-of-Life Management: Deletion or Archiving

We recommend setting clear policies for a team’s lifecycle end, including expiration dates and processes for content retention and archiving. Involve the team owner in deciding whether a team is still needed or can be discontinued.

Possible Actions for Inactive Teams or Groups

1. Archive or Delete: For truly inactive teams, decide whether to archive content for potential future use or permanently delete the team. Archiving is often the best option as it preserves data while clarifying the Teams environment.
2. Convert to Private Channels: If some activity remains but the full team structure is no longer needed, consider converting public channels within the semi-active team into private channels.
3. Merge Teams: Consolidate inactive teams with related ongoing projects into a single active team.
4. Review and Transfer Team Ownership: If the original team owner is no longer present, transfer responsibility to someone else to ensure continued management and policy enforcement.

Best Practices for Lifecycle Management

Best practices for lifecycle management, such as defining the team’s purpose, using workspace templates, and establishing governance policies, contribute to efficient team creation, usage, and eventual archiving. This structured approach simplifies administrative tasks and ensures an optimized lifecycle for Microsoft Teams and M365 Groups, easing the workload for your admins.

Planning and Governance

• Define the Purpose and Creation of Teams: Clearly establish the reasons for creating teams and who has the authority to do so.
• Implement Governance Policies: Set naming conventions, define public/private teams, and monitor member access permissions.
• Plan Lifecycles from the Start: Implement strategies for managing lifecycles from the introduction of Microsoft Teams and continuously optimize them as needed.

Monitoring and Usage

• Monitor Team Usage: Track how teams are used to identify inactive or underutilized teams.
• Generate Reports and Insights: Create reports to gain an overview of team activities and make informed decisions.

Recovery and Reactivation

• Identify Irrelevant Teams: Use reports to identify inactive teams.
• Reactivate Dormant Teams: Take steps to revive them if necessary.
• Manage Ownership and Access: Ensure proper control over content and resources.

End-of-Life and Archiving

• Define Post-Usage Actions: Determine the process when teams reach the end of their lifecycle.
• Set Archiving Policies: Archive or delete content as appropriate.
• Content Retention: Specify how long archived content should be retained.

Governance Policies and User Training

Developing governance policies and providing user training on team creation, focusing on naming conventions and data classification, is crucial. This helps avoid duplicates and ensures clear navigation within Microsoft Teams.

Governance Policies

1. Team Creation: Define who can create teams, set naming conventions, and establish data classification schemes (e.g., confidential, general).
2. Access Control: Monitor guest users and ensure all teams have active owners.
3. Control Usage: Track team usage and identify inactive or orphaned teams.

User Training

1. Purpose of the Team: Encourage creating teams for clear reasons and suggest using channels for smaller topics.
2. Naming Conventions: Train users to use unique, meaningful names to avoid confusion. Implement automatic naming rules for projects or departments.
3. Guest Access: Educate users on responsible data sharing with externals and proper guest access management.
4. End-of-Lifecycle (EOL): Explain the processes for identifying and archiving or deleting inactive teams.

Managing Changes in Teams

Managing personnel changes and role adjustments within teams is essential to avoid orphaned teams and effectively manage access permissions, ensuring team data security throughout its lifecycle.

Common Challenges

• Identification and removal of orphaned/inactive teams (archiving or deletion).
• Controlling access rights for internal users and external guests.
• Determining who can archive/delete teams and setting retention periods for content.
• Establishing governance policies for personnel changes and adapting to changes.

Best Practices

1. Planning: Analyze the needs for each lifecycle phase and establish processes.
2. Team Creation with Templates: Standardize team setup, approval workflows, and underlying structure.
3. Monitoring and Control: Monitor activity, ownership, access, and sensitivity labels.
4. Decommissioning: Archive or delete inactive teams and remove unneeded guest users based on predefined criteria.
5. Stakeholder Involvement: Collaborate with the legal and compliance departments.

Lifecycle Policies for Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams

Another strategic measure is to implement expiration policies for the lifecycles of Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams. Define expiration dates and procedures for handling content post-deletion. Uncontrolled growth of cloud content, especially in Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams, can be a common issue. To manage this, we recommend implementing expiration policies for these groups and teams.

Benefits

• Reduction of Uncontrolled Growth: Automatically delete or archive inactive groups/teams to maintain order.
• Improved Data Governance: Ensure compliance with data retention policies.
• Enhanced Transparency: Better track activities and user access.

Key Points

• Set expiration dates for groups and teams, triggering automatic deletion or archiving after a predefined period of inactivity.
• Notify group owners before deletion, allowing them time to extend their team or group.
• Manage the deletion/archiving of associated data (e.g., SharePoint sites, files) according to retention policies.
• Regularly review and manage external or guest users, ensuring they are not overlooked.

Additional Tips

• Use third-party apps like the Teams Manager for automatic expiration policies.
• Regularly monitor inactive teams and manage guest access.
• Remember that while lifecycle policies help contain uncontrolled growth, data retention and its impacts on users must be carefully considered.

Microsoft Purview: Data Lifecycle Management

Microsoft Purview offers a range of tools for managing compliance, risks, and governance within Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. These features are particularly relevant for managing data throughout its lifecycle, from creation to deletion.

Purview focuses on organizing, protecting, and deleting data to ensure compliance, enhance security, and free up storage space. It plays a crucial role in the final phases of archiving and deletion by enabling data retention and disposal policies.

Key Features of Purview

1. Retention Policies: Assign retention policies to Microsoft 365 services (e.g., Teams, SharePoint) to automatically delete content after a set period.
2. Retention Labels and Policies: Apply labels with specific retention settings to individual objects, such as documents or emails, and publish them across services.
3. Records Management: Mark files as “records” for stricter control.

Common Scenarios

• Deleting messages older than a certain period.
• Reviewing documents before final deletion under a retention policy.
• Automatically retaining sensitive content for a specified time.

Lifecycles of M365 Guests

Managing the lifecycles of Microsoft 365 guest users is vital for security and compliance. This process includes controlling access for external guests invited to your organization’s Microsoft Teams, SharePoint sites, and other Microsoft 365 services.

Guest Lifecycle Management Steps

1. Initial review and approval of guest access.
2. Regular review of access rights to ensure continued necessity.
3. Revocation of access when it is no longer needed or when a project concludes.

This approach minimizes potential security risks from over-privileged access,