Are you a Microsoft Teams admin and need help managing your organization? Do you need to make certain features accessible to some users and inaccessible to others? As Microsoft Teams emerges as one of the main collaboration tools in an organization, it is crucial to consider its management from the point of view of administrators with Microsoft Development firm. Teams offers a multitude of features and actions. Administrators must therefore ensure that users are authorized to perform the actions necessary to fulfill their daily tasks.
However, due to security and compliance requirements, not all features need to be available to all users and setting them up one by one can be cumbersome, especially when there are multiple users and teams. The strategies are there to help you solve this problem. In this article, we’ll learn how policies work in Microsoft Teams, what their benefits are for admins, and how to properly manage and implement them.
What is a Microsoft Teams policy?
Policies are used to perform tasks in different areas of Teams, such as meetings, messaging, apps, etc. You can use them to make certain features available to users and allow them to perform certain tasks. Can this user or group schedule meetings? Can they edit sent chat messages? Should these features be accessible to users? All of these configurations can be managed through Microsoft Teams policies.
As shown in the image above, these policies can be set in the Microsoft Teams admin center, as can custom policies specifically tailored to your organization (note: this is not yet available to the public sector community (GCC)). Read on to learn how the policies in this package can be used and implemented in your organization.
The five types of strategies in Teams and how to manage them
There are five types of strategies to use to effectively manage Microsoft Teams. As we said above, the following policies are template-based and are supported by policy packages.
Meeting Strategies
Administrators can use these policies to define which features attendees of meetings scheduled by users in the organization can access. Administrators can use predefined global or organization-wide policies, or create custom meeting policies tailored to user needs. Meeting policies cover general meeting settings, content sharing functionality, attendee and guest experience, and more.
Microsoft Teams meeting policies can be implemented in three different ways: per host, per user, and per host and user. All of this impacts the meeting experience before, during and after the meeting. Please see the image below to see the differences.
Voice and calling strategies
These policies control calling functionality in Microsoft Teams, such as emergency calls, caller ID, call routing, and more. Voice policies apply to organizations that have deployed phone systems, while call policies control whether users are allowed to perform call actions such as making private calls, forwarding calls to voicemail, sending calls to call groups, etc. Voice and calling policies can be easily managed in the Microsoft Teams admin center or with PowerShell commands.
Application Strategies
These policies are used to control Microsoft Teams apps in your organization. There are three sub-strategies for managing these applications:
Custom app policies : Admins can control who is allowed to upload custom apps to their teams.
Authorization policies: Admins can use these policies to allow or block apps from Teams Store.
App configuration policies : Allow administrators to install and pin apps on behalf of users and control org-wide settings.
Messaging Strategies
Admins can use these Microsoft Teams policies to control which chat and channel messaging features are available to users, both owners and members of those channels. A global policy or an org-wide default policy will be automatically assigned to all users unless they are assigned a custom email policy. Here is an example of email policies that you can configure. Click here to view the full list.
Owners can delete sent messages.
Users can delete sent messages.
Read receipts.
Chat functionality.
Use GIFs in conversations.
Send urgent messages with priority notifications.
Live Event Strategies
These policies are primarily used to control who can create live events in the organization and use the features that will be offered to attendees. In the default org-wide policy, Teams users in your organization can create live events. The default features are:
Closed captioning and transcription are disabled;
Recording settings are set to “Always Record”;
All users in the organization can join live events.
These settings can be customized based on your organization’s preferences and the needs of your users.
