The Matter-Centric Guide to Microsoft Teams€¦ · The Right Mix of Teams Microsoft Teams is a...

The Matter-Centric Guide to Microsoft Teams

Prosperoware Best Practices

Written by Sheetal JainCTO & Co-Founder, Prosperoware

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With 20 million daily active users, according to Microsoft, Teams is the fastest growing product in Microsoft's history. Teams is an enterprise software targeted at improving organizational collaboration. It extends into a hub for other applications through its hundreds of connecters, bots, and tabs. These capabilities have transformed it into an irreplaceable platform for its users.

Teams provides a myriad of benefits, starting from volume reduction of internal emails. At Prosperoware, we have seen a 70% reduction of email volume since using Teams as a primary internal communication platform in May 2017. This allows us and other organizations to focus the email inbox to important client correspondence. It also ensures that we do not miss crucial emails in a sea of internal chat and even lengthy banter sometimes.

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• Private Chat: enables individual or group collaboration outside the Team or Channel. It is equivalent to

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Team: is a top-level container. Think of them as a workspace. It can be created for a project, department, client, office, and committee, to name a few. Organizations can have up to 500k Teams in the platform with private or public security. Each Team the organization creates comes with a SharePoint site and an Office 365 group. Up to 5,000 people can be added into one Team, and one user can be a member of 2,000 Teams at any given time.

Channel: is the second-level container of the Team. Think of them as a folder in a workspace. Each Team can have up to 200 channels, with the General channel automatically created every time the organization starts a Team. The General Channel also has a folder in SharePoint, tabs, and a chat. All Channels created in Teams inherit their security from the Team they belong to. Organizations can also create up to 30 private Channels with different security from their top-level Team.

Also, Teams can be used to foster external collaboration with clients, vendors, and suppliers.

Teams’ structure is quite straightforward, with three key objects: the Team, Channel, and Private Chat.

Microsoft Teams enables e-discovery search through which organizations can collect relevant information from Teams, Channels, Private Chats, and files. It makes this process simpler by storing information in easily accessible places.

Type Location

Private Chat

Team Conversations

Private Chat Files

Teams Files

Private Channel

Voice Mails

Meeting Recordings

A Hidden Folder in User’s Mailbox

Shared Mailbox

One Drive

SharePoint Site / Document Library

A Separate Site Collection

User’s Mailbox

Microsoft Stream

Skype for Business. Individuals within the organization can create private chats with one or multiple people who are Teams users. Each private chat allows collaboration and sharing of content within the organization.

Challenges for the Legal Industry

The legal and professional service industries are amongst the few industries with a large volume of concurrent projects. If each matter is a project, the number of matters in a given firm can be substantial. On average, a large law firm opens a few hundred to a few thousand matters in a month. Depending on the industry, a lawyer may be working on 10 to 500 matters in a year.

This large volume of matters brings with itself a high need for improved collaboration. Teams has been able to partially address that need, but there are also several challenges along the way. This includes the ability to quickly provision automatically, complete bulk actions, or comply with data privacy & governance regulations.

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Teams also allows organizations to find out where their content is stored by offering geo-location choices for new tenants. This can be accessed by going to the Admin Portal in Teams and clicking on Data Location under Organization Profile.

In addition to its structure and e-discovery capabilities, Teams offers integration with hundreds of out-of-the-box apps and bots to improve productivity. It can also display any website as a tab, making it easier to cross-link internal and external applications and sites. Some useful integrations might be:

• Document Management System (DMS): enable organizations to view their projects / matters in parallel

• Financial Management Systems: provide organizations with a quick overview into the financial status of a

• CRM: display key client contact information

• Project / Tasks Management Systems: currently supported out-of-the-box applications are Trello, Asana,

• Internal Systems: if the organization’s internal application is web-based, Teams provides effortless

with Teams

project / matter

Smartsheet, and many others. If not available as out-of-the-box, organizations can connect to any other project management system

integration with any website through tabs.

The Right Mix of Teams

Microsoft Teams is a horizontal product and comes as a out-of-the-box platform. Microsoft provides guidance and best practices on its structure, but organizations must rely on their imagination and experience to adapt it to their needs, the industry they work in, and the ability of their employees to use it appropriately. Depending on this level, training may be required to increase adoption.

When an organization plans on deploying Teams, determining the right way to structure it becomes the first challenge they face.

Provisioning

Organizations need to provision Teams for their projects or clients. They either do this manually, using a tremendous amount of resources, or try to provision automatically through integrations with other systems. For example, when a project is created in the Billing System, it should also be provisioned within Teams. This automatic provisioning is currently possible within Teams, but requires PowerShell scripting, causing inefficiencies within organizations.

Metadata

Organizations need to be able to search for their content quickly and easily. Teams has limited metadata functionality allowing organizations to search only by name and description of the Team. It does not enable custom fields or tags to associate Teams by client name, matter name, or department code, making it difficult to apply unified governance across systems.


Deploying with Governance in Mind

Evolving privacy & cybersecurity laws and regulations have a long list of requirements for organizations. All organizations need to adhere to these laws and regulations to avoid hefty fines due to negligence and potential breaches, which also threaten revenue and reputation.

Organizations must minimize risk around their content which starts by designing processes with data privacy in mind. Deploying Microsoft Teams as a collaboration platform requires organizations to have set processes in place to protect personal data in projects. Setting these processes and applying governance principles across systems and platforms (including Microsoft Teams) can be a challenge for legal and professional service organizations.

Even when provisioned properly, Teams can sometimes have different names from the projects / matters or clients for which they were created. This causes confusion amongst users who have a difficult time identifying where their documents need to be placed for collaboration. It could lead to content being stored in the wrong location, increasing risk and liability for the organization.


Managing Users

When organizations deploy Teams, they need to manually add users to different Teams and Channels. When a user is no longer with the organization, someone needs to manually remove them from the projects they were collaborating in. In large organizations, this can cause inefficiencies in resources.

Bulk Updates

Administrators and Power Users in Teams will need to apply bulk actions to multiple Teams or Channels at once. Even though Microsoft Teams has a robust set of APIs and PowerShell commands, this capability is severely limited or non-existent. If an administrator needs to bulk update names or security across multiple teams at once, they must use APIs to perform them.

When users are disabled or removed, their personal chats become invisible, and some are even deleted. The messages users posted on a Team, Channel, or Chat are displayed as being received from an “unknown” user, making it difficult to understand who originally posted them. To avoid losing important content, many organizations manually preserve or copy user content to the relevant Team.

The “unknown” user challenge gets complicated if that user was the owner of a Team. This person is the one who manages all aspects of the Team. If they are not within the organization, the Team becomes ownerless, weakening the governance of that Team.

Security & Audit

Microsoft Teams has a strong security model, but it has limited capability to automatically provision security or enforce it on an ongoing basis. To ensure compliance and security on a need-to-know basis, organizations must set security and report on it manually.

Microsoft has enabled Information Barrier policies within Teams. This allows organizations to define information barriers as Office 365 policies. Microsoft will enforce these barriers when someone updates Team Membership or requests a Private Chat. With the exception of a Public Team, a user must be an explicit member of a Team to have access to it. But Teams does not support “exclusion” limiting a member’s ability to access certain content within the Team.

Archiving

When a project is closed, organizations can either hide the Team from the users’ list with the “Focus” feature, archive, or delete it. Administrators must manually archive the Team as there is no automatic way to do so. Teams does not integrate with a billing or matter management system to trigger automatic archiving once the project / matter is closed.

Also, archived Teams count towards the 500k limit of Teams that an organization can have. While this is a high number and should be enough for some time, it could present an issue at later stages. Organizations must carefully plan archiving and deleting Teams to stay under the 500k limit.

Transferring Content to Other Systems

Some organizations prefer to use Teams while collaborating on an open project / matter. Once the project is closed, there is a need to move all the content within the Team into a Document Management System (DMS). Also, if the organization is close to the 500k Teams limits, instead of deleting Teams, they might want to simply move their content to the DMS. This is currently possible only through manual download of all content and then upload to the DMS as there is no automatic option to do so.


Third-Party Integrations

Even though Teams offers hundreds of out-of-the-box applications and bots’ integrations, organizations must be careful to read their license and data movement policies. Privacy regulations and client requirements also apply for third-party integrations and vendors. Because of this, organizations must make sure they are not sharing personal data violating policies and increasing liability.

Best Practices

To address these challenges, organizations can follow some simple best practices that will improve usage of Teams and its governance.

Find the Right Structure for TeamsThere are a variety of structures organizations can use for Microsoft Teams. Some common guidelines from Prosperoware are outlined below.

Matter Team

Given the large number of supported Teams (500k per organization) and security models, we recommend organizations create one Team per project / matter. The Channels within the Team can represent different phases or processes within each matter.

Client Team

A client-centric structure could be an alternative to the matter-centric approach. Each Team can represent a client with Channels created for each project / matter, as long as the total number of matters is less than 200 (currently only 200 channels can be created per Team). If an organization intends to collaborate externally with clients, administrators need to create private channels for internal communication and exclude clients from those channels.

If an organization wants to maintain a matter-centric structure, it can create client Teams for client-related communication.


Channels

Depending on the type of project / matter, multiple channels can be provisioned for it. The “General” channel should be used for announcements, and for some matters, there will be no need for other channels. For other matters, like litigation, multiple channels might be beneficial, such as channels for deposition and communication.

If the organization intends to collaborate externally through Teams, it is recommendable to keep some of the internal channels private and limit external user access.

Tabs

Organizations can use Microsoft Teams tabs to link to websites, their Document Management System (DMS), litigation software, docketing, court, or billing systems.

Department (or Practice Area) Team

Department-level Teams can serve as a knowledge center and internal communication hub for the firm’s different practices. The practice group leader can have their team chat, post best practice documents, department goals, and more.

Office Team

For larger organizations with multiple offices, an office-level Team can provide a common place to view and share events related to the office. An office administrator can communicate upcoming local events, birthdays, cafeteria menus, holiday reminders, and visitor announcements.

Firm Team

A company-level Team can serve as the central point of communication for the entire organization. This is where the leadership team can post shout-outs, new hire and promotion announcements, policy changes, and more.

Firm Teams should be public and accessible to the whole organization. Currently, there is a maximum limit of 5,000 members per Team.

Private Chat

Private chats should be limited to private-only communication between employees and should not contain any matter-related discussions. The danger of sharing such information through private chat is that new team members are deprived of it. The search feature for private chats is weaker in Microsoft Teams. It makes it difficult to locate important content shared through private chat. This process becomes even more challenging when someone leaves the organization and their private chat is either deleted or the sender cannot be identified. Additionally, applying information governance policies is harder on private chats.


Litigation Chicago Matter -1 Matter - 2 Client - 1Firm

General

Random

News

General

Goals

General

Cafeteria

Events

General

Depositions

Trial-Preps

Billing

General

Research

Billing

General

Billing

Figure 1: Sample Teams for a Firm

Create Standard Naming Conventions

Since Teams does not support additional metadata, it is important to design consistent and standard naming conventions. This makes it easier to locate content and place it in the right Team, decreasing risk and liability.

Limit Who can Create Teams

To avoid administrative headaches, limit who can create Teams. By default, all users can create Teams, so organizations need to disable the out-of-the-box option in the UI. Ad-hoc Team creation can make it more difficult to apply standard naming conventions and provision correctly. Limiting Teams creation also helps avoid problems with ownerless Teams.

Plan & Monitor External Sharing

External collaboration is one of the hallmark features of Teams. However, this should be carefully planned and monitored to avoid breaching governance guidelines or become an administrative headache.

Set Up Moderation

Teams supports setting up proper moderation on how messages are posted, use of emoji, GIFs and language check.

Fully Vet Third-Party Integrations

Teams comes with a range of out-of-the-box applications. There are 500+ plug-ins, some of which transfer data to their websites. Unless fully vetted, these plug-ins should be carefully enabled.

How CAM Enables Matter-Centric Lifecycle Management & Governance

Prosperoware CAM is a platform for privacy and regulatory compliance for content systems. CAM improves processes while reducing organizational risk around privacy and cybersecurity. It helps organizations create a folder structure that identifies matters, engagements, opportunities, projects, campaigns and others, in your content systems to improve processes. CAM then maps the structure to a directory and adds a governance layer to support need-to-know security, data minimization, and subject access requests.

Auto Provisioning of Matters (Teams)

CAM integrates with many commonly used Billing and Matter Management systems such as Aderant, Thomson Elite, Rippe Kingston, Prolaw, CPI, Clio and any application with REST API or databases access (if on-premises). CAM can automatically create Teams, Channels, Tabs, and Users based on metadata from these source systems.

Automatically Rename Teams & Channels

Similar to provisioning, CAM can also automatically rename a Team when a matter, engagement or project name changes. CAM will also update Channel names if the channel was renamed and provisioning through the CAM templates.

Membership Updates

CAM reads the membership of matters (if available) from Billing or Matter Management systems. This can be an explicit list, or read from implicit metadata, such as responsible lawyer, billing lawyer, originating lawyer, associates, and others. It then automatically adds them to the group. Whenever this information is changed in the billing system, such as adding or removing users, CAM automatically updates the Team membership.


CAM supports a variety of content systems, including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Office365, iManage, NetDocuments, Kira, HighQ, and more.

The advantages to using CAM for this purpose is that it enables service desk and IT users to update Team membership upon request without explicitly being owners of the Team. The platform also has a consolidated audit log of all user activities across applications managed by CAM.

Assigning Custom Metadata

While Teams does not support custom metadata, CAM supports unlimited metadata on a matter. CAM also

tracks related contents for all matterd across multiple systems. One can associate one or more Teams to a

Matter (Project). Each CAM matter object has metadata including client & matter codes. This indirectly enables

each Team to also have these codes.

Bulk Updates

CAM synchronizes all Teams, Channels, related SharePoint Sites, Documents, Security, and Audit information into the CAM database. This provides the ability to easily query all Teams across the organization and bulk update, e.g., add “L-” prefix to all Litigation matter Teams, or add a “JSmith” suffix to the end of matters where JSmith is the responsible lawyer.

Need-to-Know Security

Through CAM, administrators can set up need-to-know security across content systems, including Microsoft Teams. CAM can act as an adapter to enforce ethical walls or confidentiality policies too. It stores ethical wall and policy information in CAM Controls Center. Using Controls Center, CAM can proactively manage and update Teams security (CAM C5 license is required).


Reporting

CAM provides out-of-the-box reports and a SQL query interface to query Teams and Office 365 data via SQL query. One can write queries to gather all information about Share-Point sites, Teams, Channels, Audit and Security and then display results in the UI, export them into Excel or PDF or have them sent to someone via email.

Frequently used queries can be saved and executed as needed or on a scheduled basis. Since CAM has a SQL interface, one can write simple queries to get types of data that otherwise require complex PowerShell or REST API code. For example:

• Find all Teams that Paul does not have access to

• Find all Teams where external users have access

• Find all Teams where Paul and Jill both have access

• Find all Ownerless Teams

• Add Jill to all litigation Teams

Data Movement In & Between Systems

CAM enables organizations to move matter-related content from Teams to another system, such as the DMS. CAM allows data transfer from Teams and OneDrive content into iManage, NetDocuments, or archiving it into the organization’s AWS S3 instance (CAM C4 license required).

Data Minimization

CAM Controls Center can enable data minimization polices. Data minimization polices can be as simple as making a Team read-only, archiving within Office365, moving content to another system, and then marking Teams for archival or deletion, etc. (CAM C5 license required).

Conclusion

When used properly, Microsoft Teams is a productivity booster application. In today’s world where employees are spread across geographic boundaries and remote work is on the rise, effective collaboration is important for the success of any organization. One must carefully consider pertinent governance challenges and benefits of all features. Products like Prosperoware CAM help manage privacy & governance challenges and allow organizations to focus on leveraging the best of Teams.

Happy Productivity!


CAM

Systems IncludedMatter Directory - Data Map

Master Metadata Management

Matter / Workspace Provisioning & Management

User & Group Management Across Systems

Business Continuity

Analytics - Metadata Security & Audit - Queries & Dashboards

Bulk Update of Metadata & Security

Distributed Administration Across Supported Systems - Service Desk

Export

Movement of Matters / Documents In & Between Systems

Dynamic Groups - Matter Teams

Rollback of Bulk Changes

Event - Trigger Framework

Data Minimization / Retention Workflow Engine

Personal Data Detection

Licensed

Minimum Quantities

Price per Month - $

C1 C2 C3 C4 C5

1 1 2 4 Unlimited

per User

50

5.75

per 1M Docs

5 M

135

per User

50

12.00

per User

50

15.00

per User

50

18.00

License What You Need

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We are a thought-leading software enterprise company for a digitized world. Our core competency is an expert understanding of enterprise systems, data and processes in organizations, and building technology for transformative change.

We develop software for privacy and regulatory compliance for content systems, and financial matter management.

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