Get the visibility you need to see what’s going on in your Microsoft Teams and Groups with a dashboard without using the Teams usage report in Powershell.
Once you’ve deployed Microsoft Teams across your organization, it’s important to make sure people are actually using this productivity tool the right way. Otherwise, you risk a disorganized, chaotic environment where people have access to things they shouldn’t. That’s why it’s crucial that you have the right tools that allow you to quickly see and identify what really goes on in your tenant.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the challenges many of you face when using Microsoft’s tools to learn more about your teams and groups, and how ShareGate can make a difference in the management of your Teams by providing you with all the information you need in one centralized place.
In this article
How can you see all your teams and groups in Teams?
You might be asking yourself, why would I need increased visibility on all my teams and groups? It’s simple, it helps you identify whether people in your business are using Teams the right way. It allows you to answer questions such as:
- How many teams and groups are in my tenant?
- Who exactly is using Teams?
- What are people using Teams for?
- Why are people creating teams or groups?
- How sensitive is the information shared within teams and groups?
The answers to these questions provide valuable information that gives you the full picture of your organization’s Teams usage and can help to guide your governance policies and drive user adoption. Spot potential problems that could arise, such as users creating multiple teams that are unused, and course-correct them before they escalate. Put simply, visibility helps you better manage and secure your Teams, its usage as well as your company’s data.
Common problems in Microsoft Teams: Visibility, organization and management
Teams plays a central role within your organization, so it’s important to keep a close eye on what’s going on. Microsoft’s tools alone aren’t always enough to give you the visibility you need to guide your decision-making, for two main reasons:
- The information you need lives in multiple admin centers
- Some information is simply unavailable
This means that since there is no one centralized place for you to go to when you want to know more about your teams and groups, you spend time and energy shuffling between admin centers looking for answers. This isn’t the best use of your time, especially when the answers you’re looking for, such as which users have shared files externally, are nowhere to be found.
How do I get visibility with Microsoft?
Using Microsoft’s current tools to find different information about your Teams can be tricky. That’s mainly because the information you’re looking for might be located in several different admin centers, requiring you to a Teams usage report in Powershell, or even to purchase an Azure AD Premium P1 or P2 license. Depending on the information you’re looking for, it can quickly become confusing, time-consuming and labor-intensive.
For example, if you’re looking for a summary of the number of teams or groups that have been created in your tenant, and who the owners and members are, you must sift through the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Microsoft Teams admin center, the Microsoft 365 compliance center, and the SharePoint admin center.
Details such as the privacy status of teams or files that have been shared externally can be useful in shaping your governance policies but to get that information you have to pull and reconcile reports from different admin centers. With no way to automate this process, you’re left having to scour various admin centers every time you want to evaluate the effectiveness or adjust your policies.
Looking to identify orphaned or inactive teams and groups? In this case, you’ll need to run a Teams usage report in PowerShell. It seems like, for the most part, no matter the insight you’re looking for, there’s just no straightforward and easy way to get the visibility you need about what really goes on in your Microsoft Teams environment.
A smarter Teams dashboard built for you to manage your tenant
Going through a multi-step process every time you want to diagnose and solve a problem in your tenant takes up valuable time. At ShareGate, we believe that it’s our job to create tools that simplify your day-to-day, which includes enabling you to see what goes on in your Teams, all in one place.
From the moment you connect your tenant to ShareGate, we crawl your teams and groups and analyze your environment. We then show you all your teams and groups in one dashboard, almost instantly, on the Teams management module’s Manage page. You can then filter the data by purpose, sensitivity, activity status, and more, to find out exactly the things that help give you a full picture of your organization’s Teams usage.
And that’s not all. ShareGate automatically flags issues for you, so that you can resolve them before they escalate. This means you no longer need to pull and reconcile reports manually or run PowerShell scripts to identify issues that have occurred within any of your teams. We’ll flag any problems that could impact your ability to properly manage and secure Teams.
In case you missed the first article of this series where we covered the problems that we focus on, they are: inactive teams, orphaned teams, team purpose, team sensitivity, external sharing and guest access. They’re the ones we focus on right now as we believe they have the biggest impact on the organization and safety of your Teams.
No matter your organization’s approach to governance, whether self-serve is turned on or off, or if you make use of provisioning forms, you can still benefit from great visibility and insights into your teams and groups that are available to you in one centralized place within ShareGate.
Simply log on to ShareGate, choose the problem you want to view, filter accordingly, and take action on any issues that have been raised. Easy peasy!
It’s your single source of truth that saves you time by doing all the heavy-lifting on your behalf so that you no longer have to sift through multiple admin centers, pull reports or run PowerShell scripts. Instead, you get to spend more time solving problems that have occurred and putting in place the right governance policies to keep your tenant secure and up to date.
Our product team is currently working on upgrading the dashboard to show you the progression of specific problems within your tenant since the activation of ShareGate. This means you’ll soon be able to see how inactive teams within your tenant have evolved, whether they’ve increased or decreased, the type of actions that were taken, and more.
If you’re ready to identify what truly goes on in your Microsoft Teams environment, make sure to try out ShareGate for free! And if you already have a ShareGate subscription, you’ll be happy to hear that ShareGate is included. Simply activate it today and you can start saving yourself both time and energy while better managing and securing your tenant.
In the next article of this series, we’ll take a look at how ShareGate can help reduce team sprawl, and maintain an organized Teams environment for your users.
