Challenges with Microsoft Teams Administration

Microsoft Teams is the darling of the Microsoft 365 suite, with very substantially every single app in the ecosystem pushing for their share of person authentic estate.

And with extra than 270 million energetic people – it’s not tricky to realize why.

Nevertheless, this ongoing press for anything to be in Microsoft Teams generates considerably of a problem for the ongoing administration of the platform.

For starters, how do we determine what is administration of Microsoft Teams? The item sits on major of the Microsoft 365 platform, leveraging critical workloads these as Exchange, Azure Active Directory, and SharePoint, still is also a platform unto alone.

Some time back I sat in a area with a bunch of fellow MVPs and Microsoft staff members to design and style the MS-700 “Managing Microsoft Teams” test. We had a amount of debates about what a Microsoft Groups administrator really should know, and what their occupation need to consist of.

When the exam blueprint was despatched out to overview, a amount of complaints were manufactured about the deficiency of voice-linked issues provided. Other complaints mentioned that there were being much too numerous security and compliance inquiries, and other individuals stated that the exam simply included far too quite a few components of the platform.

When I say some time in the past, I suggest mid-2019, when Microsoft Teams was barely 2 many years old. Since then, the platform has grown substantially equally in features as well as complexity.

Nonetheless, the question however continues to be – what is a Microsoft Teams administrator, and what must they know in buy to do their occupation effectively?

The response, as in numerous similar instances, is “it depends”.

Contemplate this situation: Contoso has deployed Microsoft Groups to its workforce. Staff members report that when they do the job remotely, they are not able to obtain the Information tab from any Group. On the other hand, they also report that this problem does not take place when performing in the office environment or related by using VPN.

The respond to in this scenario, is that Contoso has a conditional access plan utilized to accessing SharePoint, and a different coverage for accessing Microsoft Teams.

So, who is dependable for addressing that? Is it the safety workforce who defined the conditional accessibility policy? Is it the intranet crew who are dependable for taking care of access to SharePoint? No matter, who, is this anything that can be tackled with the flick of a swap, or should really there be a stability critique to ascertain possibility and influence?

And is the Microsoft Teams administrator envisioned to be ready to remediate this on their own? And what are the support staff members meant to say to individuals who are affected? “Sorry, we want to accomplish a protection review – it’ll be about two weeks until eventually our up coming Cab conference, so possibly you can question your peers to e mail you the needed files as attachments.”

Though you might read this and imagine that this issue should not have occurred if items were being performed adequately – that’s specifically the position. Determine “properly”. Outline who need to have been involved in the conferences.

The truth is that administering the Microsoft Teams platform will come with a ton of strings attached – some thing that ought to be taken severely, with because of thought supplied to innumerable eventualities. Let us acquire a glimpse at but a compact sampling of the troubles.

Can I see your license make sure you?

Within just Microsoft 365 there are quite a few distinct licensing selections and scenarios. Even within the numerous licenses, you can pick what attributes of Microsoft 365 are enabled and which are not.

The next table supplies an case in point of some of the products bundled in Office 365 E3, and what feature of Microsoft Groups is afflicted when they are not allocated to the person:

It is not uncommon for directors to not give people total entry to the Microsoft 365 solution suite as they are not completely ready to assist them, are attempting to phase the release of features, or in some circumstances – really don’t completely comprehend them and as a result do not recognize the value they supply end users.

In these situations, end users can have diverse encounters primarily based on their license allocation. A person person may possibly be capable to use Planner and as such assigns duties to their peers, but some of them may perhaps not be capable to accessibility these responsibilities as they have a distinctive license construct.

And I’m not even obtaining into the particulars of why the organisation logo seems in the assembly foyer for some people and not other folks (hint: it will come down to whether they are licensed for Innovative Communications).

Administrator != whole obtain

If an organisation has in spot very good stability and administration practices, they may use Privileged Identity Manager – a component of Azure Energetic Listing Program P2 (I considered we had been completed conversing about licensing!?). And with this in head, administrators must only be elevating to the essential authorization degree to execute the undertaking.

So you’ve elevated to be a Groups Administrator because you want to control the applications available to customers? No sorry, you just cannot do that.

Want to glance at the audit log to see which consumer invited a visitor into the Staff? Nope, cannot do that possibly.

Sadly, staying a Groups Administrator does not give you almost everything you have to have to administer Microsoft Teams. Instead, admins will have to elevate up to be a World-wide Administrator – a little something that should really in theory be a past vacation resort.

Define “inactive”

A typical activity essential when administering Microsoft Groups is to thoroughly clean up inactive Groups. There are a number of ways to accomplish this operate, nonetheless the topic of this unique portion is all over defining what is inactive.

As described in the Microsoft Teams use report, activity is measured by buyers and channels – and the blend of actions done by 1, in the other.

So, it helps make sense that an administrator could search at the report and primarily based on amounts of inactivity, figure out which Groups can be archived or even deleted, appropriate? Incorrect.

As described before, Microsoft Groups is both a system unto by itself, as well as a system on major of other platforms. So we can not merely identify a Team’s action stage by the Crew itself. As an alternative, we can glimpse to SharePoint and see no matter whether the fundamental workforce web site (certainly, “team site” is a SharePoint term from the early 00’s) has any action. It does not have any activity? Excellent, we can archive/delete it. Let’s go to the upcoming section…

A Team is extra than what you see in Microsoft Groups

A thing I have heard many admins explain to me is that when they “archive” off the content of a, they normally just acquire the documents from the Data files tab of the channels and go them into a distinct location.

The trouble with this tactic, is that a Crew is A lot far more than just the channel articles you see prior to you. It might also be wiki material (*shudder*), Lists in the SharePoint website, Forms affiliated with the M365 Team, e-mail in the associated Trade mailbox, knowledge in Varieties related to the M365 Group, notes in the OneNote notebook, and so on. (You can browse the details on this in an write-up I wrote for Microsoft a pair of a long time ago: Groups products and services interactions | Microsoft Docs.)

And regrettably, a ton of this data is not easily obvious to administrators – generally due to the fact there are no out of the box reports, and in some situations no APIs to even get to the information (I’m appear at you Sorts).

This lends by itself to the former section, in that, due to the fact admins are unable to see the articles, admins are also not able to see the exercise. Which can potentially suggest that admins are archiving or deleting Teams which really have exercise in other workloads. (Some great steering and things to consider arrives in the variety of a different complex report I authored for Microsoft: End of lifecycle solutions for groups, groups, and Yammer | Microsoft Docs.)

Which report to use when

One thing that in the end would make all of this extra tough for administrators is the several experiences offered that present different levels of information.

The critical stories administrators will need to use are:

The problem below, is that it does not conclude there. Directors need to have to devote in customised and 3rd-bash report options in buy to get a much better comprehension of how their ecosystem is getting made use of. And we haven’t even touched on some of the previously troubles about security, compliance, entry, and other areas connected to Microsoft Groups.

Content administering!

 

 

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