How to keep access to Microsoft team sites 100% under control with smart governance
Microsoft Teams has become indispensable in the digital workplace, but without proper management, it can quickly spiral out of control. Uncontrolled team creation and limited governance options pose significant risks to your business and data. Fortunately, AXI's Teams Governance app offers a solution for efficient and secure management.
Today, it's hard to imagine the digital workplace without Microsoft Teams. The application skyrocketed during the COVID years, making working from home and remotely much easier for office workers. Even today, Teams remains the preferred tool for chat, online meetings, and content sharing.
Teams' success is largely due to its user-friendliness and openness. But that is also the application's Achilles' heel, at least from an IT perspective. After all, how easy is it to create a new team in Microsoft Teams without any follow-up? Especially in larger organizations, the number of created teams can quickly reach hundreds or even thousands.
The Dangers of Teams Sprawl for Your Organization
For IT administrators, such uncontrolled team sprawl comes with a number of risks.
- No quick overview of internal or external users: As an administrator, you want to know who has access to what and which teams are active or not.
- Uncontrolled access for external parties (guests): This can jeopardize the security of your critical company data.
- No insight into file management: Where is the information stored? Is it uploaded to the right place? Where can I find my information? And are all uploads compliant with company policy?
- Chaotic naming: Multiple teams can be created with the same name and therefore the same purpose.
- Misconfiguration: With every new team creation, a SharePoint site is automatically created, making management even more complex. Furthermore, the team owner has considerable freedom to modify the underlying site, delete files without a backup, or (incorrectly) manage access rights, causing Teams and SharePoint to malfunction.
These are just a few examples of how Teams usage can go off track. That’s why it’s essential to focus on Teams governance—managing the toolset with the same care as a responsible steward. Rolling out Teams without clear guidelines is simply asking for trouble.
So how do we fix this?
The built-in governance features in Teams are very limited. For example:
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There’s no native approval flow for creating new teams.
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Users can independently create teams, invite external users, and change SharePoint permissions.
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Microsoft Teams doesn’t offer a standard feature to enforce consistent team naming conventions.
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Teams and SharePoint do support guest access, but the management options are complex and scattered across multiple admin portals.
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Finally, Teams doesn’t provide automatic archiving of inactive teams—at least not without costly additional licenses.
Solution: the AXI Teams Governance app
The Microsoft platform is highly capable, but there's room for improvement in governance. And that's precisely where AXI can add value.
Using the Microsoft Power Platform, AXI developed a Teams Governance app to address the aforementioned challenges without requiring customers to purchase additional expensive licenses. The app is a smart solution, fully integrated into Teams, that allows you to identify different team types and map them to specific settings, metadata, channels, applications, and more.
The application was built with several main objectives in mind:
- Managing the lifecycle: The app allows you to manage the entire lifecycle of a team, from creation to deletion or archiving. This allows you to set approval flows when creating a team, or, for example, archive or delete a team after 30 days of inactivity.
- Setting policies: The app has additional management mechanisms, allowing you to assign a specific name when creating a team. You can also assign a label to a specific team type to indicate the sensitivity of the data within the team.
- Ensuring security: The app restricts the ability to create teams or grant external parties permissions to certain team types. Team owners do have additional permissions.
- Making teams discoverable: You can also assign additional metadata to teams to make them easier to find and manage.
How does AXI’s Teams Governance app work?
AXI’s Team Governance app offers a single, efficient, central dashboard for owners and admins, saving them time on management. The app gives administrators more control over external access (guests) and sensitive company data, and allows them to more quickly identify inactive teams and prevent team sprawl.
AXI’s Team Governance app:
- Reads in all teams within your organization.
- Provides an overview for owners: all their own teams at a glance.
- Provides a complete overview of all teams, including owners, members, and guests, via the admin screen.
- Enables you to quickly add missing owners.
- Allows you to check the latest activity to archive inactive teams.
- …and much more to manage your Teams environment more efficiently and clearly.
Why Teams Governance Is Essential for Your Organization
Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool, but without proper management it can quickly turn into a risky, chaotic ecosystem within organizations.
Strong governance ensures:
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Efficient, consistent collaboration without duplicate teams or scattered information
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Data security and NIS2 compliance through controlled external access
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Cost savings by archiving inactive teams
The default governance options in Teams fall short, leaving IT administrators with little control over team creation, access rights, and file management.
That’s why AXI offers its Teams Governance App—a solution that supports lifecycle management, security, and improved team findability. With this tool, administrators gain more control, inactive teams are managed efficiently, and the Teams environment stays organized and secure.
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