Staying on top of your Microsoft 365 environment feels more like running a marathon than a sprint. ShareGate makes it super-duper easy to secure, manage, and future-proof your tenant, all while empowering users safely.
Microsoft has made no bones about its commitment to improving employee experience (EX) by promoting empowered collaboration. Microsoft 365’s default self-service approach enables employees to create and manage their own workspaces and resources like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and SharePoint Online sites.
However, it’s important to set up proper guardrails to enable self-service effectively. There are a couple of options:
- Microsoft offers various tools through its admin centers and services to help you govern your environment, including sensitivity labels and retention labels—that is, if you have the time and skilled labor to harness them.
- ShareGate helps take a load off IT teams. With ShareGate, you can quickly clean up your environment, put your controls in place following Microsoft best practices, and stay ahead of the game in the modern workplace—right from the start.
This is the final blog in a series on Microsoft 365 Employee Experience. Dig into the first four blogs:
In this blog, we’ll look at four ways you can enhance your IT superpowers to create an excellent user experience and save time with ShareGate, the out-of-the-box management solution for Microsoft 365 that just works!
In this article:
1. Make Microsoft Teams security a shared responsibility
Security is a team effort. Each of us has a critical role to play. With proper guidance, your end users can do their part in keeping your environment organized and secure. By entrusting people to make decisions about group creation, external sharing, archival, and deletion, security becomes a shared responsibility.
To get started on the right foot in creating a solid foundation, we recommend developing governance policies to set the guardrails for your end users to follow. Automation is key.
ShareGate gives you four automated policies to help you maintain a secure and productive environment:
1. Inactivity detection
ShareGate will automatically find inactive teams and sites in your tenant quickly, so you don’t have to. Here’s how it works:
- Choose how many days without activity would qualify a team as inactive or leave ShareGate’s default 90-day threshold.
- Get granular with what inactivity looks like according to a team’s purpose.
- Keep, archive, or delete inactive teams yourself or manually send notifications to the owners to act on them.
And it can ask the right people to take action on those teams, whether they should be kept, archived, or deleted.
Enabling users to make their own decisions about their teams shifts some of the responsibility for security to them. This feature can significantly reduce clutter in your tenant while also saving IT’s time.
Our client data has shown that 70% of inactive teams were kept or removed by the team owner, not IT admins. This means you don’t have to write complex PowerShell scripts to identify outdated or potentially risky content, or track down owners to figure out the appropriate actions for each team. Instead, you can use ShareGate to enlist the help of owners who are better equipped to decide whether or not a team is still needed.
2. Purpose tags
Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew why users created their Microsoft teams and could assign the right governance policies to them? ShareGate lets you categorize teams by purpose.
- Purpose tags in ShareGate help you understand why users create teams. Is it to work on a project with people outside your organization? Or, is it to collaborate across your departments? You can create purpose tags to organize teams by business purposes according to the type of work being done. Apply them to teams and groups yourself or use ShareGate to let owners choose the purpose tag that they feel best represents the business purpose of the teams and groups they create.
ShareGate can help you collaborate with team and group owners by automatically asking them to apply a purpose tag and/or sensitivity tag when they create new teams or groups.
To help you get started, you can use ShareGate’s default purpose tags. We also recommend setting up your purpose tags and sensitivity tags for when you’ll use our provisioning templates—more on that later!
3. External sharing review
The External sharing review policy lets you define how often externally shared links and guest access are reviewed by team and group owners.
If you want to lighten your IT team’s workload even further, use ShareGate to delegate the decision-making to owners on whether the externally shared links and guests should be removed.
ShareGate can automatically send a Teams chatbot notification or email to owners when it’s time for them to review externally shared links and guests in their teams and groups. From the notification, owners can decide to remove any links shared outside of the organization that are no longer needed and guests who no longer require access.
ShareGate’s automation is fantastic. We’ve had such a good response [from our end users]…saying thank you so much for making me look because they actually found people that shouldn’t be in our Teams environment.
Astrid Gibbon, Communications Systems Manager at Oxford Instruments
4. Sensitivity tags
Wouldn’t it also be nice if you knew why users created their Microsoft teams and they applied the right security settings to them? ShareGate lets you categorize teams by their level of sensitivity.
- Sensitivity tags help you assess how much of a security risk a team poses to your business. That way, you can apply the right security settings to each team from the get-go! You can create a range of tags to suit your needs, edit and maintain existing tags, and monitor how they’re being applied.
ShareGate can help you collaborate with team and group owners by automatically asking them to apply a purpose tag and/or sensitivity tag when they create new teams or groups.
What happens when you contact end users by the ShareGate Teams chatbot?
Our Teams chatbot makes it easy for you to delegate, collaborate, and stay up-to-date directly in Microsoft Teams. Check it out:
If you’re trying to figure out why a team is named “Baby Yoda”, simply ask the people who know best: the owners of the team—with the help of ShareGate’s Teams chatbot. And it can automatically contact owners of all teams to apply the right tags. This way, you don’t have to guess or chase after owners for information about their teams, and you can put the decision-making to those involved.
2. Make it easy for end users to create what they need in Microsoft 365
Once you’ve built your policies, you’ll want to ensure your end users are following the guardrails you’ve put in place and are able to do their best work. We’re talking about provisioning.
Microsoft’s out-of-the-box provisioning solution doesn’t provide flexibility for organizations that need customizable templates. And while you can customize templates using PowerShell and Power Automate, these tools are time-consuming and complex.
Enter ShareGate provisioning. Create custom templates for Teams, modern and classic SharePoint team sites, and SharePoint communication sites in one centralized location. Set up your guardrails right in the templates, so end users can create what they need, when they need it, from the get-go. All IT admins with access to ShareGate can create and edit the templates, helping to increase productivity across your whole IT team.
Here’s how it works:
- First, you must consent to a new set of permissions through the Microsoft Teams admin center.
- Then you can open up ShareGate and navigate to Provisioning and get started creating your template by either selecting Teams or SharePoint.
- Name your template and add a description if you’d like.
- For SharePoint sites, choose the type of site the template is for. Then, name your template and add a description if you like.
- Once you click Next, you can define the rules of the template. This can include:
- Number of owners required
- Whether the team will be public or private
- Adding a naming convention
- Adding security settings, such as privacy levels, external sharing settings,and guest access permissions (for Teams templates)
- Pre-determined channels (for Teams templates)
- Setting multiple approvers
- Associating a provisioned site with a hub site
- Attaching an active SharePoint site and sync its content and structure to use as a blueprint
Voilà! You’ve just created your first Teams or SharePoint provisioning template for your organization in ShareGate. The next step is to make your newly created templates available to your end users in Microsoft Teams, which brings us to the most exciting aspect of our provisioning feature: the ShareGate end-user app! 👇
3. Enable end users to manage their own workspaces, from start to finish
Once you’ve created your provisioning templates in ShareGate, you need to make sure your end users can access them easily and quickly. We’ve created a one-stop shop with the ShareGate end-user app.
Fun facts about the ShareGate end-user app:
- It’s a workspace for your end users to create and manage their own teams and sites from start to finish
- It makes it easy to collaborate with owners and help them stay on top of their resources’ lifecycle management
- ShareGate will prompt owners on your behalf to help them review and resolve issues such as external sharing and guest access.
- It’s integrated in Microsoft Teams, so your end users can easily access it in the Teams navigation bar
Remember, the templates your end users will find in the ShareGate end-user app are created by your IT team. That means end users can apply the ideal settings for their new workspace’s purpose, saving you time from answering end-user requests and helping them help themselves.
4. Turn Microsoft 365 into the collaborative and secure tool it should be
We know you’re doing the hero work of holding down the Microsoft 365 fort for your organization. And while the changes you’re dealing with daily seem daunting, ShareGate can help you strike the right balance between IT control and keeping employees happy and productive.
A good place to start? Monitoring your environment.
ShareGate’s pre-built and custom reports give you full visibility into what’s happening in your tenant. Instead of hopping from one admin center to another or building PowerShell scripts, ShareGate gives you a centralized location to keep track of things in minutes, pinpoint issues, and take action with direct links to fix them fast.
Did we mention it’s easy?
From the Manage page, you’ll get an overview of your teams, groups, and communication sites. Keep things tidy by catching inactive teams, orphaned teams, guests, and externally shared links. Select any site to get a detailed summary, including permissions, owners, and members.
Filter the page to find specific teams or groups to drill down into your data.
Customize your columns to any view of your teams or groups list.
Our IT admins can now easily see our teams and find the one they’re looking for, even if they don’t know what it’s named. We’re still growing as an organization, but our data is much more manageable.
Vera Van Es, Functional M365 Administrator, Arkin
You need all the visibility you can get when securing and managing your tenant. This includes knowing when and what problems have occurred and taking action to fix them. Get these issues sent directly to your inbox through our monthly governance digest. It’ll provide a summary of your users’ latest activities and highlights the most pressing issues, such as overdue inactive teams, as well as actions you can take.
You can also set up governance alerts and receive notifications from the app when a team becomes inactive or ownerless, when a new team is created, and when a user deletes a team.
Microsoft 365, the way it should be
A self-service environment empowers employees to take charge of their own productivity without involving the IT department in a cumbersome approval process that leads to endless end-user tickets.
When self-service is enabled and access to tools is seamless, then IT and their organization can save time, foster a collaborative work environment, and improve processes. A whole range of other positive outcomes can emerge, too, including more engaged employees, mitigated security risks, and reduced ticket queues.
With tools like provisioning, automated policies, actionable reporting, and real-time monitoring, your IT team can maintain control while giving your end users the freedom they need to do their best work.
Finally, it’s Microsoft 365 the way it should be. 🙌
If you ever want a little extra help, talk to one of our experts about your specific use case, and how to optimize your environment with ShareGate.
