Chapter 16

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using Teams in large enterprises

Looking at advanced features

Digging deeper into enterprise-specific scenarios

Large enterprises have specific needs when it comes to software and communication systems. Large organizations must deal with issues such as compliance, reporting, and mass scale. Microsoft figured out how to solve these issues with its Skype for Business product and has integrated those components into Teams. So even though Teams is a new product, it was designed to pull in Skype for Business features in order to accommodate large global enterprises.

In this chapter, you learn about using Microsoft Teams in large enterprises, including how to roll out Teams across your organization and how to keep your teams and channels under control. You discover some of the advanced features of Teams, such as Cloud Voice, compliance, and reporting. You also discover some tips and tricks for using Teams in a large organization.

Managing Large Numbers of Teams

To see an overview of all your teams and manage large numbers of them quickly in a single place, you use the Manage Teams screen. To access this screen, select Teams from the left navigation pane and then select the gear icon at the bottom of the list, as shown in Figure 16-1. Note that if you are a guest user, you will see the Manage Teams link instead of a gear icon on its own, as shown in Figure 16-2.

FIGURE 16-1: Opening the Manage Teams screen from the teams list.

FIGURE 16-2: Opening the Manage Teams screen as a guest.

If you are a guest user to the Teams account, you don’t have the ability to create a new team by default, so you will not see the “Join or create a team” link next to the gear icon in Figure 16-1.

The Manage Teams screen shows an overview of all your teams in a grid view, as shown in Figure 16-3. You will see all your active teams and all the teams you have archived. The first column shows the name of the team followed by a description of the team. The third column shows whether you are a Member, Owner, or Guest to each team. The next column displays a count of the number of people in the team, and the final column displays an icon that shows you what type of team it is (Public, Org-wide, or Private). The last item in each row is an ellipsis that when clicked, displays a drop-down menu of options that will affect the entire team, as shown in Figure 16-4. These are quick options you can use to manage the team without having to go into the team and open the settings.

FIGURE 16-3: The Manage Teams screen shows all your teams in a grid view.

FIGURE 16-4: The ellipsis provides a drop-down menu of options that affect the team.

With a single click you can do the following:

· Manage team: This option opens the settings for the team where you can manage members, guests, and channels; set the team picture; configure member and guest permissions; view analytics; and add and configure apps. I cover these settings in Chapter 3.

· Add channel: This option enables you to add a new channel to the team.

· Add member: With this option you can add a new member or invite a guest to the team.

· Leave the team: You can remove yourself from the team with this option.

· Edit team: This option enables you to edit the name, description, or privacy information for the team. The privacy information is either Public, Org-wide, or Private as I describe in Chapter 3.

· Get link to team: You can get a direct link to the team with this option. In large organizations with hundreds or thousands of teams, I find sending a link to a specific team can be a shortcut to get a group of people communicating together in the same team.

· Archive team: You can archive the team with this option. This saves the information in the team.

· Delete the team: This option enables you to delete the team. This destroys all information in the team.

Archiving a team

Archiving a team removes it from being active, but keeps all the information in the team. To archive a team, follow these steps:

1. Click the gear icon that appears at the bottom of the list of teams in the left navigation pane to open the Manage Teams screen.

The Manage Teams screen is shown earlier in Figure 16-1. Note that if you are a guest user, you will see the Manage Teams link instead of the gear icon on its own (see Figure 16-2).

2. Select the ellipsis next to the team you want to archive and then select Archive team, as shown in Figure 16-5.

The Archive Team dialog box appears.

FIGURE 16-5: Selecting the option to Archive team from the drop-down menu next to a team.

3. Select the check box to make the SharePoint site read-only for all team members, as shown in Figure 16-6.

Every team has an associated SharePoint site behind the scenes. I highly recommend making this SharePoint site read-only by clicking the check box in the Archive Team dialog box. I have seen the back-end SharePoint site of an archived team cause a great deal of confusion when it is not set to read-only because people who have bookmarked it may continue to use it and have no idea the associated team is no longer active.

FIGURE 16-6: Selecting the option to make the associated SharePoint site read-only.

4. Select Archive to move the team from Active to Archived status.

The team now appears in the Archived list in the manage teams screen, as shown in Figure 16-7.

FIGURE 16-7: Archived teams are moved to the archived section of the manage teams list.

You can restore any team that has been archived. To restore a team, select the ellipsis next to a team in the Archived list and then select Restore team, as shown in Figure 16-8.

FIGURE 16-8: Restoring a team that has been archived.

Deleting a team

In general, I recommend archiving teams rather than deleting them because you never know when you might need to resurrect them in the future. However, when you are confident you want to remove a team and all information the team contained, you can delete it.

To delete a team, follow these steps:

1. Click the gear icon that appears at the bottom of the list of teams in the left navigation pane to open the Manage Teams screen.

The Manage Teams screen is shown earlier in Figure 16-1. Note that if you are a guest user, you will see the Manage Teams link instead of the gear icon on its own (see Figure 16-2).

2. Select the ellipsis next to the team you want to delete and then select Delete Team.

The Delete Team dialog box appears.

3. Confirm you understand that all information with this team will be lost and then click Delete Team, as shown in Figure 16-9.

The team will be removed from the list of teams and all information will be destroyed.

FIGURE 16-9: Confirming that deleting a team destroys all information in the team and it is lost forever.

Bringing in the Network Engineers

The network and Internet connections in an enterprise organization are critical for Teams to be successful. As such, you must make sure you have network engineers in the loop. Teams sends and receives a constant stream of network traffic between your internal network and the Microsoft data centers where Teams is hosted. In addition, Teams sends traffic through your local network in a peer-to-peer fashion. In other words, if you are calling someone in the next room using Teams, your computers can talk directly to each other instead of out over the Internet. Because Teams uses both your local network and your Internet connection so extensively, the bandwidth and requirements must be accounted for between all devices that will use Teams. Features of Teams such as video and audio calls, screen sharing, and conference calling can take up a significant amount of your network traffic, and it is important these needs are understood and met from the beginning.

Microsoft provides network guidance for engineers. The guidance is heavily technical and provides network engineers with key technical details that relate to how fast and how much data can flow through networks.

Microsoft provides Teams network guidance in two ways:

· Client to Microsoft Edge: This measurement is from the Teams client device to the edge of the Microsoft network, which Microsoft confusingly calls “Microsoft Edge” — the same name as its preferred web browser. The first is from the Teams client to the edge of the Microsoft network. This means the network traffic goes from the device Teams is running on (such as your desktop or laptop computer), through your organization’s internal network, out over the Internet, and into the Microsoft network.

· Customer Edge to Microsoft Edge: This measurement is from the edge of your network to the edge of the Microsoft network. In other words, the traffic that is going over the Internet.

Microsoft has massive capacity built into its network, so much so that it is confident that once the traffic gets to its network, things will be fine. When you hear the term “Microsoft edge,” Microsoft is not referring to its web browser product; it is referring to the edge of the Microsoft network.

The network guidance for Teams that Microsoft provides on its website is extremely technical. As mentioned earlier in this section, it is broken down into two categories: Client to Microsoft Edge and Customer Edge to Microsoft Edge. With each category Microsoft includes values for items such as one-way latency and round-trip latency. Latency refers to the amount of delay there is between a piece of data leaving one computer and arriving at another. Microsoft also provides details around the data loss that occurs when two computers are communicating with each other. The Internet is designed so that some data can be lost as it is transmitted over a network and the overall connection can still be fine. The technical term for this is packet loss. What happens is that a piece of network gear somewhere in the middle of the network might not deliver the data as expected. When this happens, the data is lost and the receiving computer has to request it to be sent again. These technical aspects are beyond the scope of this book, but they are critically important to network engineers.

Most network engineers are very particular about their networks, and rightfully so. They need to make sure legitimate network traffic passes in, out, and around their networks and that nefarious traffic is blocked. To accommodate this, nearly every large network I have seen adopts enterprise-grade firewalls. A firewall is a hardware or software device that filters network traffic based on seemingly infinite variables. For example, for a computer running a web server, only web traffic will be allowed to it and all other network traffic will be blocked.

The network traffic of Microsoft services uses a staggering number of different types of ports and protocols. All of these things are critical to ensure that Teams is easy to use and works as expected. Some wise person once said that making something appear simple is the hardest thing in the world to achieve.

In addition to port and protocol access, you will also find Domain Name Service (DNS) guidance. You will want to pay careful attention to DNS resolution. Microsoft Teams expects to be able to find Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for specific service names. Microsoft maintains a list of the ports and protocol DNS entries on its website and updates it frequently. The full listing can be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/urls-and-ip-address-ranges.

Microsoft has a great video available on YouTube that walks you through network planning in detail. You can find it by opening your web browser and navigating to https://aka.ms/teams-networking.

Dividing and Conquering with Fine-Tuned Admin Roles

You can use an astounding number of roles (43 at present count) to divide up administrative duties in Microsoft 365. Microsoft outlines these roles in a table in the Microsoft documentation. Included in the list is the role of Teams Admin, whose role is described as having full access to the Teams and Skype admin center, managing Microsoft 365 groups and service requests, and monitoring service health. Other roles relate to other services and features of these services and include Billing Admin, Compliance Admin, Security Admin, License Admin, and User Admin to just name a few.

Monitoring service health refers to the health of the services that make up the Microsoft 365 subscription. Teams is one of these services, and there are many more, including SharePoint for content management and Exchange for email.

I highly recommend enterprise organizations become familiar with the different types of administrators in Microsoft 365 and leverage their use to divide and focus duties. The full table of admin roles and descriptions can be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/add-users/about-admin-roles.

Microsoft Teams is a service that is part of the Microsoft 365 subscription. As a result, Teams administration is closely tied to the administration of all of the services offered in these subscriptions. Pay attention to the administration roles for SharePoint as well. As this book went to print, Microsoft had just reorganized and put SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams under the leadership of Jeff Teper. Jeff is rather famous as a leader for the SharePoint product, and I see this as an evolution of the close ties between SharePoint and Teams. As a funny side note, at the 2019 Microsoft Ignite conference, one of the community leaders staged a mock wedding between Teams and SharePoint, perhaps setting the stage for the reorganization we are seeing now.

Creating a Policy to Retain or Delete Content

The Teams Admin Center provides countless options for customizing and configuring Teams for large organizations. A grouping of configuration settings is known as a policy, and there are many different types of policies you can set up in Teams. I cover policies in the Teams Admin Center in Chapter 13 and Chapter 14.

One policy I find useful for larger organizations is around content retention. You can set up a policy to retain content so that it is not deleted. You can also set up a policy to delete content after an expiration period. Retention policies are set in the Security and Compliance Center, which is accessed through your Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

To create a retention policy, follow these steps:

1. Open your web browser and log in to the Microsoft Security and Compliance center at https://protection.office.com.

You need to be an administrator for your Microsoft 365 subscription in order to log in to the Security and Compliance Admin center.

2. In the left navigation pane, expand Information Governance and then select Retention.

3. Click Create to begin creating a new retention policy, as shown in Figure 16-10.

FIGURE 16-10: Creating a retention policy in the Security and Compliance Admin Center.

4. Provide a name and description for the policy and then click Next.

5. Select how long you want to retain content and then click Next.

You can also decide to delete content after an expiration date in this screen.

6. Choose the services the retention policy should apply toward.

Make sure to scroll to the bottom and enable the Teams Channel Messages and Teams Chats to ensure the policy applies to Teams, as shown in Figure 16-11.

7. Choose which teams and users the retention policy should apply to or exclude and then click Next.

By default, all teams and users are covered under the policy.

8. Review your settings and then click Create This Policy, as shown in Figure 16-12.

A retention policy can be used to address compliance requirements at both the corporate and regulatory level. You can also set up a retention policy to automatically delete data after an expiration time.

FIGURE 16-11: Enabling the Teams channel messages and chats in a retention policy.

FIGURE 16-12: Reviewing settings and creating a new retention policy.

Exploring Enterprise Voice Features

Microsoft has an offering called Cloud Voice that provides enterprise features for large organizations. Cloud Voice includes options for connecting your internal phone network to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and using your existing Private Branch eXchange (PBX) system capabilities. These topics are beyond the scope of this book, but you should be aware that they exist. Microsoft has changed the branding of some of these offerings; however, the products and capabilities have stayed largely the same. I have found that organizations that have been around for a long time already have specialized hardware, such as on-site PBX systems, and that the telecommunications engineers are happy to find that Microsoft supports this equipment.

Large organizations are happy to learn that Microsoft has several offerings that provide integration with existing telephone network equipment and network connections. Advanced scenarios are all too common with established enterprise organizations, and Microsoft has gone out of its way to make sure Teams works in almost all situations.

When your organization has some products installed locally at your organization, and those products interface with Teams, which is hosted by Microsoft, the term often used to describe those products is hybrid. This means Teams uses a hybrid approach that includes some of your organization's resources and some Microsoft-hosted resources. I should also note that I have heard Microsoft use the term hybrid to refer to some people in your organization using the old Skype for Business and some people using the new Teams. You might read about this “hybrid” approach in Microsoft documentation, but my recommendation is to think of a hybrid environment as having some products hosted and managed by your own internal IT organization and other products hosted and managed by Microsoft in its datacenter.

Reporting and Analytics

In Chapter 13, I walk through the Teams Admin Center and touch on where to find reports. Reports and analytics are critical to larger organizations in order to obtain a view into how people are using Teams and areas that might need to be improved.

You can use the Teams Usage Report to see how active users are and where they are active in channels and chats. You can also get a view into how many guests are in a team and their privacy settings. Or, you can use the Teams User Activity Report to view how many one-to-one calls a user participated in or how active a user was in a channel or chat. You will also find reports about the devices people are using and how much they are using them. Finally, you will find reports for live events and several reports around PSTN usage.

I recommend getting familiar with all these reports and reviewing them on a frequent basis. The reports are useful for people throughout an organization including IT teams, network teams, development teams, and adoption teams.

Reports are available in the Teams Admin Center. In the left navigation pane, select Analytics and Reports and then select the report you want to view.

Earlier in the chapter I talk about how you can view and manage all your teams in a grid view. You can use a similar view to see analytic information about your teams. To view the analytics for all your teams, follow these steps:

1. Click the gear icon that appears at the bottom of the list of teams in the left navigation pane to open the Manage Teams screen.

The Manage Teams screen is shown earlier in Figure 16-1. Note that if you are a guest user, you will see the Manage Teams link instead of the gear icon on its own (see Figure 16-2).

2. Select Analytics at the top of the screen to switch to the Analytics View, as shown in Figure 16-13.

The Analytics View shows the name of the team, the number of active users, people, guests, and messages as well as the type of team.

FIGURE 16-13: View the analytics for all teams.

You can click on the name of a team to jump to the Analytics View in the settings for the team.

Upgrading from Skype for Business to Teams

The effort required to move to Teams from Skype for Business depends greatly on what version of Skype for Business your organization is currently using: the On-Premises version or the Online version. If you are using Skype for Business On-Premises (meaning your own IT department is responsible for the servers and software that run it), you will be moving from a solution managed internally to a Microsoft-managed cloud solution. I have seen this become tricky when the internal IT team is the one team that has always been responsible for the communications system and it then must pass that duty off to Microsoft.

If you are moving from Skype for Business Online to Teams, you are already using a Microsoft-managed solution and the process is straightforward. Microsoft responded to the pain that several organizations reported by providing a framework and guidance to help you migrate users to Teams in an orderly fashion. Use your favorite search engine and search for Microsoft Teams Upgrade Framework. The framework includes guidance on how to get a large organization from Skype for Business to Teams.

If your organization is using Skype for Business, you need to move to Teams as soon as possible. Microsoft has announced that Skype for Business Online will be retired in 2021.

Getting Help from the Experts

The most important advice I can leave you regarding large organizations is to find a Microsoft Teams expert and get advice from him or her. Microsoft maintains a high-quality bar for their Most Valuable Professional (MVP) designation, and these people know what they are doing. Microsoft MVPs are often consultants and work with many companies. They have experienced just about every problem you can imagine, and their knowledge and insight are an investment worth making.

You can find a listing of Microsoft MVPs at https://mvp.microsoft.com. Click on Find an MVP at the top of the page and then filter on Office Apps and Services. You can also narrow down your search to your geographic region of the world.