Navigating the Microsoft Teams Admin Center

A lot of work goes into setting up and managing your Microsoft Teams environment. Many aspects of the setup will differ from organization to organization based on your needs and circumstances. However, there are some standard settings you’ll want to ensure you’ve reviewed as you begin implement Microsoft Teams as your collaboration and communication tool.

Regroove Recommends: Determining your governance plan early on in your organization’s implementation of Microsoft Teams and updating it as you progress.

Creating Microsoft Teams

New Microsoft Teams creation can be configured in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center. When you create a new team, there are lots of categories that provide options for you to customize the team to your needs.

Regroove Recommends: Locking down Microsoft Team creation – By default, everyone in the organization can create a team. We recommend locking this down to either a select group of people, or to the IT department. This prevents chaos from ensuing. It prevents the creation of multiple teams with different membership for the same purpose, or teams being created and deleted without any oversight by IT to manage the SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Group components.

Microsoft Teams Admin Center

In the ‘Teams’ category, you’ll manage policies such as whether private channels can be created, whether users will have access to Microsoft Teams Public Preview features, and which templates will be available to users when they create new teams.

Regroove Recommends: NOT providing the ability to create private channels. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is because when you create a private channel, a new SharePoint site is created as the backdrop for the channel. The new site is difficult to search for and manage, even if you are a Microsoft Teams or SharePoint Administrator for your organization. Instead, we recommend creating a new team.

Locations

‘Locations’ allows you to set emergency addresses for each of your users. These can be either business addresses, or residential, if they can be validated. Each address connects to the user’s phone number.

Regroove Recommends: Using the Bulk Edit function if many employees are changing locations at once (e.g., during an office move, or transitioning to or from remote working)

Meetings

Under ‘Meetings’ you can select meeting settings and policies. These settings apply to all meetings scheduled in your organization and include whether anonymous users can join and interact with applications, what the email invitation looks like, quality of service markers for real-time traffic, and specific port configurations for audio, video, and screensharing media.

Policies also apply to what users can do within a Microsoft Teams meeting – for instance, whether users can use audio, video, and screensharing, and whether meetings can be recorded. There are also a few settings that are particular to Microsoft Teams Live Events.

Regroove Recommends: Creating custom policies wherever possible and assigning them to groups rather than individuals. One thing to be aware of, though, is that if you need to update them after the fact, custom policy updates can take up to 72 hours while default or global policies only take up to 24 hours.

Microsoft Teams Upgrade

The ‘Teams Upgrade’ section is only relevant to organizations that are moving to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business. These settings assist organizations with the migration over to Microsoft Teams as a replacement for Skype.

Regroove Recommends: Selecting ‘Skype/Teams Only’ or ‘Islands Mode’ for the transition process.

Conclusion

This is a broad introduction to management of settings in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center. Because the needs of each organization differ so greatly, and Microsoft Teams is such a powerful and robust tool, we recommend working with a consultant to help implement your Microsoft Teams environment correctly from the start.

Looking for assistance rolling out Microsoft Teams to your organization? Get in touch at regroove.ca!

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