Too many Teams? How to organise and manage Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool that enables collaboration and communication among teams. Still, it comes with some challenges that many organisations are starting to realise. Let’s take a look at these challenges and go through the best ways to solve them.
What is behind Microsoft Teams?
Behind the simple facade of Microsoft Teams are one or more chat channels for instant messaging, and a SharePoint site that contains a document library to store your files and content.
Until the widespread adoption of Teams a few years ago, most organisations needed an IT team or an administrator to create and manage SharePoint sites. This allowed for a level of governance and process for creating, naming, archiving, and deleting sites. Today, almost anyone can create a new Team, and they do!
Too many Teams to handle
Since it’s easy to create new Teams, it presents challenges for organisations that have allowed their creation to grow unchecked, such as:
- Duplication of Teams
- Inconsistency in how and where they have been created
- Difficulty in managing the fragmentation of information and communications stored across them
So, how do you control their rapid proliferation and effectively manage the content spread across them?
How to organise Microsoft Teams
Firstly, it is never too late to implement a clear governance policy and processes to avoid the problem worsening. You should also monitor and audit the activity and content of Teams sites to ensure the procedures are followed.
Secondly, archive! Archiving or deleting unneeded Teams will cease all activity for that team.
The question then is, what happens to the content, files and information in an archived Team? Do users still need access to the archived Team? How do users know which teams are and are not active? How do you manage all the Teams users have bookmarked?
Suppose information remains spread across all these Teams. How easily can you locate a particular file or email stored somewhere amongst the hundreds or thousands of Teams sites on your SharePoint tenant if you do not know which Team it was saved in?
Find content stored across all Microsoft Teams
This is where MacroView DMS is invaluable. MacroView DMS allows users to see all SharePoint locations they can access — including Microsoft Teams — in a tree view similar to Windows File Explorer.
The tree view makes it easy for them to search, open, edit, save and share files from any location without remembering which Team they saved their content to. This can also be achieved using MacroView’s configurable and customisable search panels, which allow users to search for files and emails using keywords or metadata across an entire SharePoint environment.
View Microsoft Teams in hub sites
Since MacroView DMS also represents Teams in their associated hub sites, you can use DMS to quickly scope searches and other functions to the sites and libraries within a specific hub site.
This presents a great way to manage archived Teams where you’d like to retain the content but hide it from day-to-day view. Simply move any old or out-of-commission Teams to a dedicated Archive hub site.
This simple tweak will change where the Team appears in the MacroView DMS tree view.
From here, you have a few options:
- Keep the ‘Archive’ hub site in the tree view, allowing users to continue searching and interacting with the content within, or
- Hide the ‘Archive’ hub site from the tree view so it no longer appears to users. To learn how, see Working with hub sites in DMS and Nested hub sites on our help centre.
Learn more
Get a free trial of MacroView DMS or contact us today if you would like to learn more about how MacroView can help you take control of your document and email management in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.
