Take control of Teams: 6 key settings not to be missed

Settings that can be revisited

If your organization uses Microsoft's Teams chat-based collaboration platform, you've most likely gone through the central settings - if nothing else, you did so when you first started using the tool. But if you haven't revisited them since then, you're missing out.

Like the rest of Office 365, Teams is constantly evolving with new functionality and new integration possibilities. To maximize the benefits of Teams, it is therefore important to keep track of what is happening in the platform, and perhaps above all not to forget how much it can be customized. Here are our best tips on what you can do in the central settings of Teams.

Set a policy on which teams can be created

The fact that anyone in your organization can spontaneously start their own team is one of the charms of an intuitive collaboration tool like Teams. But if you find that it becomes confusing and difficult to navigate due to too many users creating too many groups, it may be time to set up a policy for which teams can be created. In the settings, you can, among other things, set up a restriction that allows only selected people in the organization to create new teams.

Delete inactive teams automatically

In our experience, groups are rarely removed from Teams. That's not necessarily a problem - but it can be if there are a handful of different teams for the same thing, created by different people at different times. Someone who has worked in the company for a long time can certainly navigate the right way, but for a new employee it is a challenge to know which team is the right one. To get better structure and order, you can set up a notification when a team has been inactive for a while. Then you can choose whether you want to keep it or not. If you suddenly realize you are missing a team, you can quickly and easily restore it within 60 days.

Settings for app integrations

If you want to make Teams the hub of your organization's workflow, you can connect Office 365 apps, bots and external services directly to Teams. Having everything related to users' projects in one place can be convenient - but it's not mandatory. If you want Teams to be a pure discussion space free of distractions, there's a setting where you decide if it's possible to integrate apps into Teams and who can do so.

How should notifications work?

Should users be allowed to spice up their messages with funny gifs? Should the person writing a message be notified when someone has read it? Should a user be allowed to delete an already written message? In the central settings, you can define in detail how the service should be used and what should be allowed in the different channels. Review the different options and make the choices that promote productivity, without being too strict. Maybe it's enough if those gifs can be used in a channel called "fun"?

Limit how much guests can see

If a user wants to be able to share their screen with a guest user, it is not allowed by default, but sometimes it can be justified and then there is a setting for it. It is important to keep in mind that the policy you set up in Teams should reflect the company's security policy. In some cases, it can be great that anyone can be invited to the company's Teams - but there is also a risk in allowing unauthorized access to internal information.

Decide how long the conversations will be saved.

If you never go in and clean up the conversations, over time a lot of information will accumulate in Teams. While Teams can serve as an information bank, it shouldn't be used as a business system. It's a better idea to highlight the important information and set a policy that, for example, all channel messages are cleared after six months and chat messages disappear after three. These settings make it easy to reflect your GDPR compliance and personal data policy.

We at WeSafe help you as a customer to get the most out of your Office 365 licenses. An important part is to keep you updated on what features are being released and what they could mean for your organization. Want to know more about how you can use Teams to maximize productivity and collaboration in your business? Contact us here.