Things to Consider when deploying Teams

The fast pace of change with cloud solutions is immense and as an IT Professional it can be a challenge to find time to keep on top of it all - for an end user community it can be truly baffling.

In Office 365 there are so many options, services and tools that can be used - in O365, the world is your Oyster! But if you eat too many or get some bad ones then it can give you a stomach ache… or in O365 land a head ache!! Since the release of Teams Microsoft the rate of change in the tool has been large.

Teams has been recently rolled out internally. For the roll out I was asked to put some documentation together for this - it definitely wasn't a standards document (the view that this was something that was fairly fixed doesn't work for the fast moving world of cloud) but more of a guidance doc as to how this service was to be rolled out and configured. Below are some of the highlights and things to consider when deploying into a corporate environment.

Learning from the past.

Having worked with SharePoint Team Sites (they were branded communities internally) without any automation for checking if they are still in use, who had access and closing them down if no longer required, have a level of automation in the management of Teams has a high IT priority, quickly followed by auditing if the service was enabled for external access. Thankfully both are catered for using O365 groups and Azure AD… more on that later. Here's some interesting notes I had to cover for the deployment of this…

Scope

In trying to provide some guidelines for teams, you must consider Microsoft Teams itself, O365 Groups, and Azure AD.

Pre-requisites

Pre-req's - think about how users are getting Teams installed - is this a free for all on installation or requested via a process of getting a Team itself? Licensing is key here as well - you must ensure that all users have a licence for Teams use (this also makes a good security checkpoint) but also if they need EMS E5 to audit any Teams access and group membership.

 Teams Service Configuration

There are multiple areas to consider with this.

Apps

Will all users be able to access first and third party apps (remembering that Wunderlist is classified as first party).

How will you support users who add in the "new cloud-based team management hotness" into their Team but then cannot get it to work or licence it.

Consider third party storage options too - these provide a great level of flexibility but also complexity. If you are communicating to users to use SharePoint online and OneDrive then giving them Google Drive and Dropbox as options in Team may confuse and dilute the message. Also there is security to consider here too…

Teams Client Configuration

Will Teams Members be able to use emojis, be able add external or internal users and be able to delete content are all considerations at this level as well as Email enabled Channels - all have implications on your training and communications plan as well as the culture of your organisation too.

 O365 Groups

image reference the icansharepoint blog at: http://icansharepoint.com/everyday-guide-office-365-groups/

O365 Groups is the special sauce for a lot of permissions definition across O365. A lot of services are also spun up when creating a group too - understanding O365 Groups generally is a very good thing to have! Guest Access also needs to be enabled here if you require external access to be available.

NOTE: when activating this I did notice that there was some delay to being able to add external users to the Team/Group.

Guest Permissions - aka external access.

This is a key consideration - enabling this is easy but has some big implications around external user management and content management. Thankfully flicking the external access option in the Team Service Configuration doesn't give immediate access to all your content. Each Team is its own oyster!

You will need to consider who has permission to add external users and ensure that proper and adequate education is given to users so that they understand the implication of this.

 Auditing

This leads nicely on to the Auditing features. O365 Groups integrates in with Azure AD so there are a lot of features and options available here… Auditing allows for Team Owners to receive email notifications from the environment requesting that they review who has access to the Team - this is especially important for external (Guest) access. It's a good opportunity to ensure that users understand who has access to the content and whether they should have access.

Creating Teams

Thinking about how Teams get created is important - can end users go and create them? Is there a process for requesting them and then they are created centrally? Both have advantages and disadvantages and will very much depend on the organisation and technical know-how of users - things to consider though… are naming conventions important, what's the possibility of having two teams very similar in their approach and use, can the spread of Teams happen organically and potentially boom and how does this all affect the support that you provide to your users?

Other considerations

Teams has the ability to create Teams from other Teams… in other words you can use a Template like approach for creating them - this is especially useful if you want to roll out a specific set of channels or membership or pre-defined content and would recommend this especially if you are looking to manage the creation by a central team.

Consider training - this is especially so when you look at the various components that get deployed with Teams (i.e. SharePoint, mailboxes, Planners, etc!)

Think about what this means to any Skype deployments - will you stop with the roll-out of Skype, do a big bang over to Teams or let both co-exist. Teams and Skype are currently in a transition phase so this should be taken into account.

 There is also a free SKU of Teams as well - this may also be of some use too when considering a deployment of the service (you compare the options here: https://products.office.com/en-GB/microsoft-teams/free?ms.officeurl=teamsfree).

 So in summary, there's a more to think about when deploying Teams than you may think and it can cover a number of different services in Microsoft's cloud platforms. Plan your Oysters and get those Pearls of wisdom!