Adding an Approval Step to Microsoft Teams

One of the main governance challenges with Microsoft Teams is that by default every user in your organisation can create a new Team. While some believe that this will improve user adoption, we have seen several cases where this has led to significant information sprawl and duplication. In this post, I will detail an alternative option which involves using ProvisionPoint 365 to manage requests for new Microsoft Teams. Each request will include an approval step, which will add that vital validation step missing by default in Microsoft Teams.

Disabling native Teams creation

To ensure requests for new Microsoft Teams are made using ProvisionPoint 365, I need to disable Team creation for everyone but administrators. Fortunately this can easily be configured directly in ProvisionPoint 365 by enabling a setting we call ProvisionPoint mode.

Configuring the Approval Process

In ProvisionPoint 365, I will first need to configure a Service Definition, which is a template an authorised user can request. In the Service Definition, I need to select Microsoft Team from the available object types.

Next, by using an Active Directory Group, I define which users can request this Microsoft Team.

Finally, I configure the required approval process which can have one or more steps involving users or groups. This approval process is then linked to my service definition so that any requests will trigger the approval process.

Seeing it in Action

The video below demonstrates the resulting experience to request a new Microsoft Team in ProvisionPoint 365 and the required approval step.

Summary

Configuring the approval step detailed in the post will take less than 1 hour and will bring immediate improvements to Microsoft Teams governance. It would also be straightforward to configure different types of Teams which could be requested and link different approval processes to these types.

Please get in contact to find out more about how ProvisionPoint 365 improves governance for Microsoft Teams with customisable approvals.