One of the best methods to limit Microsoft Teams usage in the company is to let users form teams that suit their needs. However, if you don’t have any constraints or control over team formation, it can soon spiral out of control and overwhelm your tenant with unutilized teams. Therefore, the issue is how to prevent users from creating new teams.
Why limit the ability to create teams in Microsoft Teams?
The answer, “You get too many teams,” may seem obvious, but it’s not relatively that straightforward. Multiple teams are not necessarily a negative thing. Contrarily, it indicates that your consumers are actively using the tool. Through the platform and the features, it provides, they collaborate more.
Security issues
Now that there are so many teams, your employees may feel inclined to utilize other platforms to complete their work due to needing clarification on which teams to use for cooperation. This interferes with your adoption efforts and raises questions about data security. Data security threats arise from unauthorized apps accessing your private data.
Productivity loss
Your employees’ efforts at collaboration will be inconsistent if they start forming multiple teams around the same subject. The same work may be saved in various teams, leading to inconsistencies, file duplication, and productivity loss.
Issues with compliance
Some businesses have internal compliance rules that forbid naming teams, files, folders, etc., using specific apps, characters, or words. These team formation and detailing standards and regulations can be readily broken if there is no oversight and control in place. Additionally, limiting the establishment of teams can ensure that all your Microsoft Teams licenses are utilized effectively if you only have a restricted number of permits.
How to prevent users in Microsoft Teams from creating teams
- Create fewer Office 365 groups.
- There isn’t a native solution available right now that lets you limit team creation alone. However, there is a way to achieve it by restricting Office 365 group creation.
You have two choices for this:
- Restrict admins from creating groups.
Apart from admins, no one in your organization can create groups using this technique.
Remember that Office 365 groups offer additional tools besides a team on Microsoft Teams, including Planner, Power BI, a shared Outlook inbox, a SharePoint document library, Yammer, Stream, and a OneNote notebook.
- In Azure AD PowerShell for Graph, you can prevent the formation of new Office 365 groups throughout your tenant.
- The disadvantage of this restriction is that you will have to grant team creation access on a per-user basis if you choose to do so. As a result, the following approach might be preferable. 2. Limit who can create groups to specific users
- You can give the authority to create Office 365 groups to a particular group of people in your company. You will have that as your security unit.
- Your security group can be created in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Executing PowerShell commands within Azure AD will be the next stage. Here, you may find comprehensive instructions.
To stop users from creating teams in Microsoft Teams
By leveraging Microsoft Teams templates and putting governance standards in place that are particular to each team, it is possible to manage team creation, avoid Teams sprawl, structure all your teams in the tenant, and empower your employees all at once. Your teams may occasionally need more rigid governance guidelines. Depending on the company’s situation, different options can allow fewer constraints and be accessible to a broader audience.
The following describes how governance rules that limit team creation at the template level operate:
1. Ensure that only chosen teams can access templates and form teams using them.
You can enable different governance aspects while building your template from an original team.
Audience targeting is one tool that prevents people from joining pointless teams without degrading the end-user experience. You may ensure that just a select group of users can see and access the template by enabling audience targeting.
By enabling audience targeting, users cannot create new teams.
2. Configure Microsoft Teams approval procedures for team creation.
Turning on Approvals allows your users to build new teams using templates while maintaining control over the system. Any company employee can be responsible for the approval process, relieving your IT department of an additional burden.
Learn more about how approval workflows can be used to create teams.
You can prevent users from creating new teams by activating the approval workflow.
3. Allocate specific teams to permanent Owners and Members.
Configuring security settings is the last step to improve team creation management. You can choose the permanent owners and members that will be added by default and set the minimum number of required owners and members.
All private channels will contain your permanent owners. This gives you more control over the information shared in teams you establish using the template.
You can also decide whether the requester will be instantly added as a team owner.
4. Control team formation by designating long-term leaders and participants.
Role-based access management
With role-based access control (RBAC), Microsoft 365 global administrators can specify permissions and limit access to functionalities in user groups. By doing this, you can modify the establishment of teams according to the duties and roles of users.
