In the rush to decentralise, accommodate remote working and remain productive, thousands of organisations globally made MS Teams the de facto standard for socially distanced face-to-face communication and file sharing.Microsoft 365 Teams is a collaboration application that helps teams of employees, project partners and agencies to have conversations, stay organised and share files. Pandemic-era uptake of Teams was vast; daily user numbers jumped from about 20 million in 2019 to 145 million by spring 2021 and around 250 million people today. But users aren’t just chatting within their Teams channels—they’re also sharing files and data, often with external collaborators.
The great productivity rush
With many IT, HR and management teams working hard to rapidly deploy technology that facilitated business as usual (or business of a kind) the transition to remote working felt like one of the corporate success stories of the pandemic. But such rapid deployment created a headache for employers: content sprawl. Documents everywhere, unregulated, unchecked and duplicated. A Wild West of data.
Taming the Wild West
Users can create multiple channels within Teams to collaborate only with people who are engaged in a specific project. They can share documents as required within each channel, which means each channel can be awash with data and documents, while documents are often duplicated across similar channels.
Users can share data within a channel that has very little governance in place, not because Teams lacks security, but because for many employers, setting up solid governance has been subordinate to simply mobilising employees. Perhaps most dangerously of all, users indiscriminately throw different types of documents onto a channel.
While most of the content shared on Teams is in the form of collaboration documents, other data can be systems of record: invoices, purchase records and so on. These records may need to be kept aligned with companies record retention policies, without duplication. Teams channels have a short lifespan as standard (administrators can extend it if need to be), so systems of record need to be designated as such and moved to permanent modern content services platforms: SharePoint, M-Files or similar, which are also easier to police and control. Proventeq can empower various administrators to do this, from in-house IT departments to department heads within various business functions (talk to us to plan or reorganise your content storage).
The risk factors
Aside from the issue of longevity, a critical challenge of Teams content sprawl is that the amount of data exchanged is massive; people simply don’t know whether they are sharing documentation that can put companies at risk if hacked or leaked.
The limited lifespan of Teams content means the platform is rightly deployed for projects with short timescales, after which administrators must archive data. The administrative burden this creates when managed retrospectively can be massive: documents must be reclassified so they can go into the right document area in permanent filing systems. Furthermore, both internal and external users can communicate and share and store data on Teams and can each have very different security protocols.
