Tag: Microsoft Teams

We’ve been surprised and delighted at how readily remote employees have taken to collaboration using MS Teams, given the sudden need to let people work from home. For now, we’re just letting them get on with it. With teams popping up all over the place, though, we’re wondering how we’ll manage to consolidate all of this current remote activity with the carefully-ordered document and content systems we use internally?

This is a question that’s cropping up a lot on Office 365/Teams and information management forums at the moment, and which we’re going to make the subject of our next MS Teams webinar. It’s important to get this right, even if – out of necessity – much of this happens after the fact. Here are 3 tips to minimise the long-term chaos of these ‘feel our way’ times.

1. 1. Sow the seeds of good practice now.

If your people have switched from Skype for Business to Teams with more than a little exuberance, then by all means let them continue to experiment with all that the platform can do to support planned and ad-hoc chat and collaboration. These are crazy times and if good work is happening at home, don’t rush to put a stop to it. Microsoft is encouraging widespread experimentation with Teams, and even the analyst community has joined the chorus, promoting the positives of collaboration over the risks that need to be guarded against.

But it isn’t a bad idea to usher users in the right direction, by giving them a few tips that will make life a lot easier later – when they’re hunting back for a recent discussion that mentioned a client, for instance; or across team activity where colleagues were sharing the latest edits to a group document.

1. 2. A bit of planning now will ease efforts later.

Make team creators and owners aware from the outset that simple choices they make now – about how they name teams; the privacy settings they put in place; and the information they set down about a team – will have a direct bearing on their ability to refer back to that content and activity in future. Being hasty or slapdash when forming a new team or chat group might result in a rapid resolution to a query or problem in the short term, but if the haphazard approach makes it hard to retrace steps or locate information later, any upfront time savings could be surrendered further down the line.

MS Teams is very intuitive to use without any formal training, so asking users to pause and think about naming conventions, security setting/team membership, and other bits of essential housekeeping, before they create a new team shouldn’t impede their progress. For them, and for information managers, this is a strong case for a ‘stitch in time’ saving nine. That is, there will be less work to do later, whether in trying to find and archive useful content, or in making sure that sensitive conversations are locked down appropriately.

1. 3. It’s never too late to restore information lifecycle management.

If these good intentions don’t come to fruition, try not to worry. Our software is very good at ‘discovering’ teams and all related information and displaying this in a dashboard – to support teams lifecycle management (security checks, information archiving, and so on). If information about certain teams is lacking, a quick look at who set them up will make it possible to track down missing information, so that administrators/information managers can edit settings and process rules as appropriate.

Our next Microsoft Teams Bite-Sized Webinar is on May 5^th and focuses on making light work of Teams Security for Home Workers.   Sign up here to find out more.

How can we get people up and running on Teams quickly so they can work effectively from home, without storing up information management and compliance issues for later?

Microsoft Teams use continues to soar as more employees are called to work from home, to help slow the spread of Covid-19. According to Microsoft’s latest figures, there are now 44 million daily users of Teams globally, who generated 900 million meeting and calling minutes collectively via the platform – per day – over the last week[1].

But where does the surge in demand for Teams leave IT/information managers? To preserve productivity, the immediate priority must be to get users up and running quickly on Teams (assuming they are not already habitual users of the collaboration and chat platform as part of their everyday Office 365-based activities).

Fortunately, this needn’t mean sacrificing information management. By setting a few simple housekeeping rules up front, IT administrators can reinstate information compliance after the fact.

Here’s how.

1. First enable, then control.

Try not to panic about uncontrolled Teams take-up. While remote-access systems are creaking under the strain, cloud-based Teams is ideal for high numbers of people suddenly needing to work remotely (and Microsoft is investing heavily in data centre expansion to keep pace with demand).

Many organisations already have Teams cued up and ready to go as part of their Office 365 package, even if the application hasn’t been used extensively until now. Although it might have been preferable to plan the rollout and give users some preliminary training, the software is intuitive and easy to use from day one. So get them up and running first; you can introduce any information policy compliance and security measures retrospectively. (Our software can help with this.)

2. Create structure through meaningful Team/chat names.

The more casual ‘chat’ element of Teams could invite problems later if discussions are about specific projects or customer cases, and they involve document sharing. Ideally, people should create proper ‘Teams’ to keep discussions and content linked and coordinated.

To cover all eventualities, encourage creators of discussions or Teams to use meaningful names to describe them. This will make it easier to ‘tidy up’ content later – simplifying the process of searching for and filing documents and updated information. If a Team or discussion relates to a client case number or project name, for instance, including that reference information in the name will make it possible to map conversations and files to related pieces of work, and store them in the correct document/content repository back at base.

Rather than name a chat or Team after the people involved, then, encourage employees to name them after the given topic/client/project ID.

3. Reassure rather than restrict users.

Considerations should as whether to restrict external sharing, and other security and privacy measures, can be dealt with once users are up and running and using Teams confidently and productively. In the meantime, maximise the Teams set-up to influence how people use it, and to build their confidence that they are ‘doing it right’. This will help to reassure employees as they experiment with the software and discover how it can help them do their jobs more effectively.

Tabs such as Conversation View and Files View will be displayed by default, but consider which other features you want to add on the start-up page – for example Planner, to aid task management; and/or OneNote for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. Setting out a clear structure for users to follow will help ensure that the Teams rollout goes the way you want it to, even if the opportunity to ‘train’ employees has been compromised by the need for speed.

A tailored ‘welcome screen’ is a good idea for steering users towards preferred practice. You could include guidance and useful links in an initial conversation topic as part of a new Team, for instance. Microsoft suggests a page like this, which you could adapt with your own messaging/tips:

Welcome to Microsoft Teams for <insert_company_name>. Teams is a chat-based workspace that brings together chat, files, people, and tools in one place.

We created a team called “Get to know Teams” to get you started. Use it to experiment, ask questions, and discover the possibilities of Teams.

To join, click <link to the team>.

I’ll be expanding on these points in a new Microsoft Teams Bite-Sized Webinar. Sign up here to find out more.

[1] Microsoft cops to 775% Azure surge, quotas on resources and ‘significant new capacity’ coming ASAP, Then Register, March 29^th, 2020: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/29/microsoft_azure_usage_surge_coronavirus/

How can we empower our legal teams to collaborate on matters at home using Teams, without undermining our office document management system where all content resides?

MS Teams usage, already at dizzy heights, is going through the roof as a result of the call for more people to work from home. In recent days, MS Teams activity has soared by 500 per cent, a trend that is likely to continue as people adapt their working habits to the ‘new normal’. The surge in Teams use is not surprising: the platform is designed for remote collaboration – supporting both formal and ad-hoc communications and document-sharing to maximise productivity.

In this new series of short, practical articles, I’ll be addressing some of the common questions information managers have as they try to strike the right balance between rapidly providing flexible support for the way people need to work, and maintaining information policy compliance. Continue reading “Ask the Microsoft Teams experts: empowering home workers – Legal Teams”

Microsoft Teams is fast becoming the business world’s default collaboration environment. Today, more than 13 million people using it daily, and 19 million weekly [1].

To cement the successful use of Teams in their own organisations, however, information managers need to ensure they have sufficient control over related activity. After years of perfecting policies, balancing controls and adhering to the latest Data Protection requirements, organisations don’t want to risk inadvertently undermining those efforts. That is, they need to avoid giving employees carte blanche to set up Teams for any purpose or topic, in any format and with random naming.

It’s something we’ve explored in detail in a new, practical white paper. We advocate that, to get the best from MS Teams, without opening a new can of worms, companies need to adopt best-practice governance – as they have in all other aspects of team collaboration and content management.

In the paper, we set out some proactive measures organisations can take to maintain order.

In brief, these include:

1. Governance/Team creation
This is about governing Teams as any other collaborative workspace – with equivalent consideration to who can create them, where and what for, and with appropriate controls, templates and rules. Such controls can be set within Repstor Custodian products, which provide comprehensive and intuitive information governance natively from within Office 365 – across Teams and SharePoint.

2. Naming conventions & classifications
Applying standard names and classifications to Teams is a great aid to governance, simplifying Teams discovery, as well as housekeeping and overall lifecycle management – eg the level of privacy that needs to be applied, and the relevant retention rules.

Custodian encourages the use of agreed naming conventions and Team property descriptions, making it easy to locate and link related Teams, and apply discrete controls to certain content, as appropriate. It also provides easy, intuitive navigation using a hierarchical approach to linked Teams, and graphical dashboards for easy, at-a-glance lookup.

Managers can tailor the dashboards to the groupings they want to see, and decide how to structure the links between related Teams. There’s also scope to add links to external portals and information, such as training videos, so everything appears in one place.

3. Content management
While the use of Teams is predicted to drive down the use of email, this means of communication is not going to go away.

Custodian, in conjunction with its Repstor Affinity automated email filing capability, which is managed natively from within Outlook, encourages users to file and access content centrally in the designated workspace/Team collaboration area.

Custodian also provides links to existing document management systems forming an organisation’s main systems of record or repository, maintaining strong information governance. It also provides a complete audit of changes to any of this content.

4. Security & sharing
Growth in collaboration, especially with external parties, can introduce privacy and security implications, without the right safeguards to lock down certain content. Even when employees are using private channels to share content, it is necessary to secure commercially-sensitive documents or information, or GDPR-protected data.

By applying structure and governance, Custodian supports the freedom for users to collaborate productively across organisational boundaries without risk of policy or regulatory infringement – ensuring that sensitive information does not leak from the organisation.

5. Lifecycle management/classification continued
Whether from an systems hygiene or regulatory compliance perspective, Team workspaces and the information within them should not be allowed to linger indefinitely on servers or in archives.

Strong classification and automated lifecycle management via Repstor Custodian ensure that Teams are archived or deleted at the right time, supported by timely reminders and prompts.

Freedom through control
Ultimately, ensuring good governance around MS Teams is about allowing employees the freedom to collaborate spontaneously, with sufficient control of content over the short- and the longer-term.

Download the full white paper here.