I have worked in the space of content production and collaboration for quite a few years now. Along this journey new tools and technologies have arrived to help us better manage the content being produced. At the same time content production increases, and it’s no easy feat for neither technology nor people to keep up with the constant battle of managing content the right way, and making sure the right content is readily available and findable.
To simplify matters we can divide the problem into two.
- How do you make sure content is stored correctly according to business rules and regulations which might apply
- How do you make sure stale/old/obsolete content is removed and not hoarded to ensure valid content is surfaced
I have previously written about why and how you can take control of Teams and Office 365 Group creation in Office 365, and approaches automating the lifecycle management of Teams and Groups.
There is no one solution which just solves everything and each business has to form their own opinion on how they want to use technology to improve the quality of content stored in their organization. The only known is that the longer you wait before deciding on a path, the harder it is to fit the solution on top of existing content afterwards.
Once you have decided what your governance plan should be, you need to figure out what parts can be automated, and what parts require human actions – and how can you ensure humans take the correct action. If being asked if you should keep or delete a Team/Group if it seems inactive, the default human response is probably to keep it, as then you won’t get blamed for deleting anything important. A better process might be to make sure employees take ownership and are made accountable of their content – to filter out the good from the bad – and perhaps move the good content to another permanent storage.
Or go the easy route and let anarchy take hold and hope technology by itself will solve all your problems in the long run – any plan decided is better than no plan at all :)
If some of this sounds interesting, feel free to attend my session “What Options do You Have to Govern the Lifecycle of Office 365 Groups and Teams?” at the SharePoint Conference in May:
Office 365 Groups and Teams introduce many workloads such as document management, tasks management, and chat logs. Built into the Office 365 platform your organization has many tools and functions available to help control how information is governed and to help you control the lifecycle of the information stored within the groups and teams.
The goal of my presentation is to show what tools are available in the Office 365 suite to help with lifecycle management and to show how you can use them to ensure a healthy environment with reduced information bloat while still maintaining information control and integrity. Some of the functions are available in different administration UI’s, but for the IT Pro’s loving PowerShell out there, most of it today is available via PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph.
Using admin UI’s and PowerShell I will dig into some of those capabilities and show how you can get hold of the information you need in order to implement your business rules and requirements for lifecycle management of Office 365 Groups and Teams.
Save $50 and register via https://pzl.no/SPC19 today!
Happy content controlling!
