Office 365

Hi All, I would like to pick some brains to  understand whether you or your organization receive requests for team creation all the time especially who work in legislative environments -  and for what purposes ( if mandate is there to provide some info regarding the needs for separate team). We got something like that are tasked to provide  guidelines as to how long we should retain if it becomes inactive or users have not accessed it - what may be a good and safe practice. My initial sense is to treat it as a project but am not certain so throwing out and appreciate any response. Thank you!

Hi Sidra,

Teams management is a mix of policy and operational requirements.

Teams engage in business conversations and store business documents - so they need to be covered by your organisation's policy.

How they are create, monitored, and retired needed to be governed by orderly processes - otherwise, you will have a proliferation of teams (and associated components - team sites, channels, grousl etc.). I recommend that you have a process which:

1. Manages set-up - approval by a business owner, creation of the associated team site using a template (so that site creation follows a reusable framework), confirmation of members, etc.
2. Manages monitoring - for instance, a process by which you check in with the Team owner on a scheduled basis to verify that the team and its components are still active.
3. Manages archiving when closed

Good luck.

Chris

@Christopher Foley Thank you so much for laying out framework down, it is absolutely concise and I love it! Have given me lots to think thru, much appreciated.

I see different approaches through companies and legislative bodies. Standard is there is the strictly regulated approach which is summarized very well in the post by Christopher.

Opposite to this I see also the collaborative approach, which is just for daily collaborative work (no data classification, no explicit data lifecycle, self regulated access rights) with very few regulations. Members in such an environment enjoy the freedom of "messing around" with Teams (and the SharePoint behind it), quickly involving collaborators all over the world and adapt structures and way of working on the fly, as required for small projects or more social/networking/explorative related activities. A lot of this collaborative entities are just forgotten after the purpose of their creation is gone. The many additional Teams app which can be engaged are also in high use in this environment. Look at it as a laboratory/sandbox environment, before some of the good ideas born and tested there will be established in a controlled way on the regulated business Teams, which is a separate instance.
Users have to be informed on a regular basis, that this environment is just supported from a technical point of view by the IT department (e.g. restore after a technical problem). Old and orphan information objects will not be archived and will be lost completely after a clean up took place. It is accountability of the single user or team lead to copy important data to the "official" SharePoint/Teams for correct preservation in a regulated lifecycle process.

I apologize for the long intro, Sidra, but I would like to better understand the category of data in your case: Is it long term important business data or more short term related collaborative data?

Thanks,
Valentino

Thank you @valenrtino ducati for taking time detailing the different approached, it has given me great insights and multiple avenues to look at before I compile any recommendations. Thank you for this forum @AIIM International and highly skilled professionals who always come out to assist community at large!! Awesome work!