Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups from 365 Admin Perspective

Revolutionize Your Business With Generative AI

From product design and software development to virtual agents, content creation, and reporting, GenAI is transforming business. Our AI experts help you unlock GenAI’s full potential and drive growth.

Let’s Get Started

I wanted to share the FAQs that may answer some of the questions for anyone who is planning to launch Microsoft Teams and Office 365 groups to the organization. I will answer when to choose what collaboration tools on Office 365 in a separate post. I know there is a lot of overlap between the different productive Office 365 workloads.
This FAQ list will address some of the questions from compliance, governance and data protection perspectives. I will add another post to talk about a high-level plan for companies planning to launch Teams and Groups for high-caliber collaboration.
What is Teams from admin perspective?
Teams is not a new radical product. Rather, it’s a new UI-branded product using various service layers of other Office workloads brought together in this newly packaged UI. Most content generated here is saved in respective applications. So in lack of better teams is a mashed up product. For developers, Teams is a product built on top of next generation Skype for Business customer network code base (ref here).
So that’s a good news for admin. Why? If you have already thought through how you want to secure the Skype for Business chats, Exchange restrictions and OneDrive Sync/SharePoint access restrictions and eDiscovery, the same can be extended here.

List of FAQs

1. Where can I go to check the list of all the MS Teams that are created and being used in my tenant?
   Currently Teams does not have an Admin Page UI to get a list of groups. Need to use PowerShell commands. The development of these and the command is currently in progress. The fact is every team will have an Office 365 group site as plumbing
2. Where can I go to check the list of all the office 365 groups that are created and being used in my tenant?
   https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/groups or Azure AD will list the Office 365 groups created in the organization. Get-AzureADMSGroup
3. Can you set a prefix for all groups and teams that are being created?
   Yes. Set this using the Azure AD Latest PowerShell in the coming releases. As of now you cannot add prefix
4. Can you expire or archive a group based on last activity?
   Yes. This is being developed and should be out soon. Allows Admins to expire the group if there has been no activity
5. Can you associate content types and labels to Groups content?
   No to content types at this time. But labels can be applied to all documents that are being created. Only one label for all documents under that team.
6. Can you show teams content in the SharePoint search center?
   Yes. SharePoint Search Center will render documents, News, Pages in the search results only if you have access to that group.  Conversations and chats will show on Delve Search Center
7. Where does the Teams Conversations get stored? Can they be searched
   They are retained in the teams databases while as chats are stored in Skype for Business/Exchange Conversations.
8. Can the documents shared on teams have content types and retention policies applied to them?
   Yes and No. Currents teams does not allow use of content types directly. However if the document is uploaded from the SharePoint interface it does allow tagging that document with “Label” which in turn can have disposition rules set at the Office 365 tenant level.
9. Can you capture additional metadata information on the document that is being uploaded?
   Not really, because the current interface does not allow edit property panel traditionally used on SharePoint. Teams are made for quick collaboration and allows use of folders to make it easy to capture some metadata.
10. Can you pick and choose who all can create new Teams site. Also allow a security group to have permissions to create new groups?
    Yes. By default you will be enable teams to full tenant and then go to manage licenses for users and remove the Teams license to individuals.
11. Can you expire and archive a group or a site?
    Groups and teams have different component in them. While the conversations are archived on teams databases the chats are archived on the Exchange and documents/notes are on the SharePoint. So the answer is yes and they can be. MS team is building on a built-in function which will allow archive content

Teams and Groups are products that are not meant to be tightly governed and restricted; it would default the whole purpose of its existence because it’s built for quick collaboration. If business is looking at long-time collaboration then classic SharePoint team sites are a better approach.
Some References for you for more information and features included:
Groups/Teams Management PowerShell Scripts and Managing Groups with Azure AD PowerShell 2
More Info For Administering
Microsoft Teams Tech Community
Teams Release Notes from MS
Office 365 Product Roadmap
Thanks to # Erin Zapata for helping me validate some FAQs.