Microsoft Teams Governance – Naming Conventions

Using a naming policy is an important part of a Microsoft Teams governance strategy. In fact, it’s an important part of governance for all your Office 365 objects including Office 365 Groups and SharePoint sites. Without a suitable naming policy, it will become increasingly harder to understand your organisation directory as it grows.

Why is this so relevant for Microsoft Teams? A Microsoft Team is based on an Office 365 Group which in turn has a SharePoint site collection, an Exchange mailbox, a Planner and other Office 365 components. On top of that, the Team has channels and other Office 365 components. Each of these components relate to each other and can be surfaced in different places in Office 365. Having a common naming convention for these components will help to provide consistency and therefore help user adoption and directory understanding. This becomes ever more relevant when creating a large number of Microsoft Teams and your directory continues to grow.

Creating a naming policy in Office 365

Office 365 has a Groups naming policy feature if your tenant is using Azure AD Premium. This is a great governance feature and allows users to provide a name for an Office 365 Group or Microsoft Team when requesting. The policy can use tokens from the users Azure AD profile such as department or country. Using these policies allows a a naming convention such as:

• Team Project One IT UK
• Team Project Two HR US

In these examples, the word Team is static text. IT, HR, UK and US come from the users Azure AD profile. And the words Project One and Project Two are provided by the user at the time of request.

This feature may be enough to satisfy the naming convention requirements of the Microsoft Teams governance strategy for many organisations. However, for others, some more flexibility may be needed. This is where an Office 365 provisioning tool like ProvisionPoint can help.

Using ProvisionPoint for Office 365 naming policies

ProvisionPoint uses Service Definitions to manage the different types of Office 365 objects that can be created in an organisation. A part of this can be a request form. The request form is used to ensure the user that makes the request provides all the information required under the governance policy.

Lets say for example, the Microsoft Teams governance strategy requires the user to provide a project name, department and country when requesting a new Team. To cater for this, a service definition can be created for a Project Team. In the service definition, the naming policy can be set to use the values from the request form. This would result in names for the new Microsoft Teams such as:

• Team Project One IT UK
• Team Project Two HR US

There may be another type of Microsoft Team required for internal projects. These Teams require a cost centre and a project sponsor. To cater for this, a new service definition can be created with a new request form. The request form would have fields for cost centre and project sponsor. This will allow the naming policy for these internal project teams to be as follows:

• Team Project Three (internal) C001
• Team Project Four (internal) C002

In addition to the name, the email address and url can also be set as follows:

• T_ProjectThree_int_C001
• T_ProjectFour_int_C001

Governance conclusion

As you can see, there are options for defining naming conventions in your Microsoft Teams governance strategy. Office 365 has some great options out of the box with Azure AD premium. While ProvisionPoint offers similar options out of the box without the need for Azure AD premium. There is also more flexibility to integrate request values in the policy with ProvisionPoint.

If you want to know more about Governance with Microsoft Teams, why not request a demo of ProvisionPoint?