How to Manage the Lifecycle of Microsoft Teams for Better Microsoft Governance

Help, I have way too many Teams channels and I don't know what to do about it!

If this sounds familiar, then you're in luck.

In the video above you will see that I can pull a report around the total number of teams in my environment. Using the example in the video,  I've got about 4,400 teams out there, hopefully being utilized. But we're going to take some steps to ensure that they are being utilized.

First up, we are going to see how many external users are in our Microsoft Teams instance. We pull a separate report and out of those 4,400, 1,000 users are actually external! 

So that makes it doubly important to really put controls in place around how long these Teams channels last and who has access to them. 

So what can I do about these Teams channels if things are eligible for lifecycle management? Well, in the CoreView workflow engine, we've gone ahead and designed a little workflow that is going to take some steps. 

  1. Contact the owners of the Teams channel in question
  2. Owners will be prompted to make a choice:
    • Do you want to archive this team?
    • Do you want to remove this team outright?
    • Do you want to extend the lifecycle of this team?
  3. Based on the selection made above, your tenant admin can execute some sub-routines within the workflow

How to Automate Archiving of Microsoft Teams Channels 

Well, if we jump back to our reporting, I've saved a handy dandy report here called teams eligible for archival. This report is paired down to give me all teams that do have external membership. In other words, the external member's total does not equal zero which has not been changed in the last 90 days.

So this is the criteria by which I have defined eligibility for your Microsoft Teams lifecycle management. In my example, 18 teams are eligible for archival today.

If I schedule this report, well, I want to know this information every quarter. You can throw a three-month period into place. So every three months on the last day of the month, this report's going to run.

And if, and only if, this report is not empty, or in other words if there are teams eligible for archival, according to the criteria I've defined. Then, and only then we'll take some actions and low and behold that action absolutely can be to pivot those results directly into my team's 90-day lifecycle workflow.

Workflow to Automate Deletion of Microsoft Teams Channels

  1. Name of the Team
  2. Owners of the team
  3. Users of the Teams Channel
  4. Add notification step

What essentially was done is we created a policy. A roboticized, mechanized, automated process that will on a schedule check for teams that are eligible for archival.

And then pivot those results into a workflow that without any human intervention, beyond that testation will take the steps necessary to either archive, remove, or extend the lifecycle of those Microsoft Teams.

It's just one of many ways the CoreView can assist with this topic of Teams governance.

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