There is no doubt that we are living in unprecedented times. The globalisation of the world economies that once opened the international flow of business and trade, has now left us more open to pandemics. For years, zombie movies have portrayed the global spread of a virus as science fiction and what felt like overnight, we switched to lock down and "the new way of working". Now we're living the zombie movie in real life.
It seems like such a long time ago that we went about our everyday working in our office settings or onsite with clients to sudden lockdown. The “new way of working” is presenting us with a number of new challenges. One that we never saw working in the traditional office, such as "Zoom bombing". The combination of loose security on meetings and so many people online with nothing to do leads to bored individuals disrupting meetings for fun. Even in a time of crisis, these challenges need to be addressed.
With these meetings spanning anywhere from an hour for 4 hours, many people are complaining about a new condition called "Zoom Fatigue" which is the physical and psychological stress associated with adapting to spending all day in online meetings and talking to the "checker box" of talking heads in your meetings and trying to separate your work life from your personal life.
There is no doubt that lockdown has impacted every aspect of our lives, both financially, psychologically, professionally and personally. On the business side, from the economy to working from home to the personal side, grandparents in lockdown and students learning online. But we need to pause for a second and think about how lucky we are in Australia. Traditionally the isolation of our island nation has been considered a negative, but now in the time of a pandemic, we have been able to secure our borders and control the virus outbreak at a reasonable rate. When we compare Australia's situation to other countries like Russia or the USA, we are still the lucky country.
There is another extremely positive side to lock down that not a lot of people are realising. In a matter of weeks, we were all able to switch over to working from home with very little effort. A number of people have pointed out that COVID19 has been a major catalyst to accelerate the digital transformation for everyone and like many technical advances in Australia, we have taken it in our stride and now over a month or more into lockdown depending on your state, businesses are still conducting business online. COVID-19 has forced us to re-evaluate how we conduct business digitally but the good news is the technology is there and businesses are adapting to the new way of doing business online.
But with this great rush to adopt new technologies and the new way of working, there are a number of potential issues lurking in the background. Some of these issues require our immediate attention and some of the issues are less urgent and can be postponed. In the urgent category are topics such as security and account management. As Zoom Bombing has highlighted, the new online way of working has many security challenges that need to be addressed asap. This leads many to ask “what platform should I use?” or “which platform is more secure?” and those are good questions. The answer? Microsoft 365 and Teams.
Choosing an enterprise platform like Microsoft 365 for collaboration is a natural choice for many businesses in Australia. With collaboration via video call becoming the new norm, Teams has become the natural selection to continue collaboration and communications for many businesses. A number of other collaboration platforms have had issues with security and stability, but Microsoft Teams continues to underpin many business collaboration platforms. With Microsoft Teams currently recording over 75 million users a day, the company had to make security a priority. Already having key security features like 2-factor authentication to enhance the security of Microsoft Teams accounts and conferences. With features like 2-factor authentication being added from the get-go, it allows for a lot less stress in regard to the security already proving the be a more effective choice.
When it comes to managing Microsoft Teams there are a number of methods to create governance. There are approximately 8 different ways a user can create a new Team and unfortunately, most general users within your organisation currently have permissions to. So, with the current momentum to create and collaborate online, during lockdown combined with everyone’s ability to create new Teams, we can see the potential for uncontrolled growth of Teams which will lead to "team Sprawl". In the short term, it is highly recommended that most organisations should restrict who can create new Teams as the simplest method of controlling the number of Teams before it gets out of hand. Microsoft Teams can be like the proverbial genie, once they're out, they’re hard to put them back in the bottle.
By restricting who can create new Teams, you give your organisation time to formulate the appropriate policy and guidelines around your organisation’s Microsoft Teams strategy. Depending on your organisation's strategy you may choose to create an approval process to support the provisioning of new Teams. Your organisation should definitely consider nominating more than one Owner for each Team. The Owner will become responsible for managing the Team on a day to day basis and can be delegated the responsibility of managing the security for the team. In these turbulent times, it’s also worth considering assigning more than one Team Owner to ensure the responsibility of managing the Team can be shared across multiple people.
Creating a provisioning workflow that can automatically provision a new Microsoft Teams site based on a predefined template to ensure consistency across all team sites. A provisioning workflow can be used to automate the assignment of security and the configuration of the Team setting. By making this a repeatable process, the risk of accidental configuration and security issues are greatly reduced.
Automating the provisioning process to provide this level of consistency will also assist with end-user adoption and training. If all your Teams are configured and ready to go from day one, then users can spend more time using teams rather than configuring teams.
With the talk of COVID-19 lockdown loosening and the promise that things might return to normal, we also need to think about what to do with our Teams when they reach the end of their useful life. From record management and compliance perspective, you may need to consider archiving some of your Teams. With the businesses conducting their day-to-day business in teams and making critical decisions on information and conversations stored inside, you may need to archive the Team for future reference. Some of your teams might not have any significant value and they should be deleted. Once again, this is an opportunity to call on the Owners of the Teams to ask them how they need their Teams archived or deleted when they are no longer required.
If you would like to talk to an expert about providing governance to your Microsoft Teams today then contact us.