What is collaboration governance?

Collaboration governance is how you manage users' access to resources, compliance with your business standards, and ensure the security of your data.

Organizations today are using a diverse tool set. There's the team of developers using team chat, the executives sending email, and the entire organization connecting over enterprise social. Multiple collaboration tools are in use because every group is unique and has their own functional needs and work style. Some will use only email while others will live primarily in chat.

If users feel the IT-provided tools do not fit their needs, they will likely download their favorite consumer app which supports their scenarios. Although this process allows users to get started quickly, it leads to a frustrating user experience across the organization with multiple logins, difficulty sharing, and no single place to view content. This concept is referred to as “Shadow IT” and poses a significant risk to organizations. It reduces the ability to uniformly manage user access, ensure security, and service compliance needs.

Services such as Microsoft 365 groups, Teams, and Yammer empower users and reduces the risk of shadow IT by providing the tools needed to collaborate. Microsoft 365 has a rich set of tools to implement any governance capabilities your organization might require.

This series of articles will help you understand how groups, teams, and SharePoint settings interact, what governance capabilities are available, and how to create and implement a governance framework for the collaboration features in Microsoft 365.

Setting up secure collaboration with Microsoft 365

There are many options for deploying Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams for secure collaboration in your organization. We recommend you use this governance content alongside Set up secure file sharing and collaboration with Microsoft Teams and its associated articles to create the best collaboration solution for your organization.

Data residency governance

If your organization is multi-national and you have data residency requirements for different geographies, include Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo as part of your collaboration governance plan.

Why Microsoft 365 groups are important in collaboration governance

Microsoft 365 groups lets you choose a set of people with whom you wish to collaborate, and easily set up a collection of resources for those people to share. Adding members to the group automatically grants the needed permissions to all assets provided by the group. Both Teams and Yammer use Microsoft 365 groups to manage their membership.

Microsoft 365 groups include a suite of linked resources that users can use for communication and collaboration. Groups always include a SharePoint site, Planner, a Power BI workspace, a mailbox and calendar, and Stream. Depending on how you create the group, you can optionally add other services such as Teams, Yammer, and Project.

Microsoft 365 Groups includes a variety of governance controls, including an expiration policy, naming conventions, and a blocked words policy, to help you manage groups in your organization. Because groups control membership and access to this suite of resources, managing groups is a key part of governing collaboration in Microsoft 365.

Define collaboration governance best practices for your organization

There are multiple places to collaborate and have conversations within Microsoft 365. Understanding where users can start conversations can help you define a strategy for communication.

There are three main communication methods supported by Microsoft 365:

• Outlook: collaboration through email with a shared group inbox and calendar
• Microsoft Teams: a persistent-chat-based workspace where you can have informal, real-time, conversations around a variety of topics, organized by specific sub-groups
• Yammer: enterprise social experience for collaboration

• Teams: chat-based workspace (high velocity collaboration) – inner loop

  • Built for collaboration with the people your users work with every day
  • Puts information at the fingertips of users in a single experience
  • Add tabs, connectors and bots
  • Live chat, audio/video conferencing, recorded meetings

• Yammer: connect across the org (enterprise social) – outer loop

  • Communities of practice - Cross-functional groups of people who share a common interest or expertise but are not necessarily working together on a day-to-day basis
  • Leadership connection, learning communities, role-based communities

• Mailbox and calendar (email-based collaboration)

  • Used for targeted communication with a group of people
  • Shared calendar for meetings with other group members

As you determine how you want to use collaboration features in Microsoft 365, consider these methods of communication and which your users are likely to use in different scenarios.

Collaboration governance best practices checklist

As you start your governance planning process, keep these best practices in mind:

• Talk to your users - identify your biggest users of collaboration features and meet with them to understand their core business requirements and use case scenarios.

• Balance risks and benefits - review your business, regulatory, legal, and compliance needs and plan a solution that optimizes for all outcomes.

• Adapt to different organizations and different types of content and scenarios - consider the different needs for different groups or departments and different types of content such as intranet content versus a user's OneDrive content.

• Align to business priorities - business goals will help you define how much time and energy you need to invest in governance.

• Embed governance decisions directly in the solutions you create - many governance decisions can be implemented by turning on or off features in Microsoft 365.

• Use a phased approach - Roll collaboration features out to a small group of users first. Get feedback from them, watch for help desk tickets, and update any needed settings or processes before proceeding to a larger group.

• Reinforce with training - adapt solutions such as Microsoft 365 learning pathways to ensure that your organization-specific expectations are reinforced with Microsoft-provided training.

• Have a strategy for communicating governance policies and guidelines in your organization - create a Microsoft 365 Adoption Center in a SharePoint communication site to communicate policies and procedures.

• Define roles and responsibilities - identify your governance core team and work through key governance decisions about provisioning and naming and external access first, and then work through the remaining decisions.

• Revisit your decisions as business and technology changes - meet periodically to review new capabilities and new business expectations.

For a closer look at these practices, read Create your collaboration governance plan.

End user impact and change management

Because groups and teams can be created in several ways, we recommend training your users to use the method that fits your organization the best:

• If your organization does most of its communication using email, instruct your users to create groups in Outlook.
• If your organization heavily uses SharePoint or is migrating from SharePoint on-premises, instruct your users to create SharePoint team sites for collaboration.
• If your organization has deployed Teams, instruct your users to create a team when they need a collaboration space.

This helps avoid confusion if users are unfamiliar with how groups relate to their related services. For more information about how to talk to your users about groups, see Explaining Microsoft 365 Groups to your users.

Key collaboration governance capabilities and licensing requirements

Governance capabilities for collaboration in Microsoft 365 include features in Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, and Azure Active Directory.

Collaboration governance planning recommendations

Follow these basic steps to create your governance plan:

1. Consider key business goals and processes - create your governance plan to meet the needs of your business.
2. Understand settings in services - settings in groups and SharePoint interact with each other, as do settings in groups, SharePoint and Teams and other services. Be sure to understand these interactions as you plan your governance strategy.
3. Plan to manage user access - plan the level of access you want to grant users in groups, SharePoint, and Teams.
4. Plan to manage compliance settings - review the available compliance options for Microsoft 365 groups, Teams, and SharePoint collaboration.
5. Plan to manage communications - review the available communications governance options for collaboration scenarios.
6. Plan for organization and lifecycle governance - choose the policies you want to use for group and team creation, naming, expiration, and archiving. Also, understand the end of lifecycle options for groups, teams, and Yammer

Training for administrators

These training modules from Microsoft Learn can help you learn the governance features in Microsoft 365.

Information protection

Training:

Manage information protection and governance

The amount of data being generated today is growing faster than ever, employees want to get work done everywhere, and the regulatory landscape is constantly changing. Microsoft's solutions for information protection and governance help organizations achieve the right balance between keeping their data protected and their people productive. This learning path can help you prepare for the Microsoft 365 Certified: Security Administrator Associate and Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administration Expert certifications. 5 hr 13 min - Learning Path - 7 Modules

Training:

Protect enterprise information with Microsoft 365

Protecting and securing your organization's information is more challenging than ever. The Protect enterprise information with Microsoft 365 learning path discusses how to protect your sensitive information from accidental oversharing or misuse, how to discover and classify data, how to protect it with sensitivity labels, and how to both monitor and analyze your sensitive information to protect against its loss. This learning path can help you prepare for the Microsoft 365 Certified: Security Administrator Associate and Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administration Expert certifications. 1 hr - Learning Path - 5 Modules

Security and compliance

Training:	Demonstrate fundamental knowledge of Microsoft 365 security and compliance capabilities
	Learn about the Microsoft 365 security and compliance solutions areas and the capabilities available to help enterprises secure their enterprise and meet regulatory requirements. If you're unfamiliar with basic cloud computing concepts, we recommend you take Cloud Concepts - Principles of cloud computing. 3 hr 11 min - Learning Path - 8 Modules

Illustrations

These illustrations will help you understand how groups and teams interact with other services in Microsoft 365 and what governance and compliance features are available to help you manage these services in your organization.

Groups in Microsoft 365 for IT Architects

What IT architects need to know about groups in Microsoft 365

Item	Description
PDF | Visio Updated May 2022	These illustrations detail the different types of groups, how these are created and managed, and a few governance recommendations.

Microsoft Teams and related productivity services in Microsoft 365 for IT architects

The logical architecture of productivity services in Microsoft 365, leading with Microsoft Teams.

Item	Description
PDF | Visio Updated April 2019	Microsoft provides a suite of productivity services that work together to provide collaboration experiences with data governance, security, and compliance capabilities. This series of illustrations provides a view into the logical architecture of productivity services for enterprise architects, leading with Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft 365 information protection and compliance capabilities

Microsoft 365 includes a broad set of information protection and compliance capabilities. Together with Microsoft’s productivity tools, these capabilities are designed to help organizations collaborate in real time while adhering to stringent regulatory compliance frameworks.

This set of illustrations uses one of the most regulated industries, financial services, to demonstrate how these capabilities can be applied to address common regulatory requirements. Feel free to adapt these illustrations for your own use.

Item	Description
English: Download as a PDF | Download as a Visio Japanese: Download as a PDF | Download as a Visio Updated November 2020	Includes: Microsoft Purview Information Protection and Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention Retention policies and retention labels Information barriers Communication compliance Insider risk Third-party data ingestion

Conference sessions

Watch these conference sessions to learn more about governance for Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams.

Fundamentals

Learn the fundamentals and new innovations in Microsoft 365 Groups, including management and governance at scale, best practices for driving usage and adoption, and self-service.

• Embrace Microsoft 365 Groups

Governance

Learn how to set up your groups expiry lifecycle, naming policies, classification labels, collaboration with external guests, and manage group creation permissions.

• Transform collaboration and fight shadow IT with Office 365 Groups

Customer example

See a behind-the-scenes example of how Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint, Teams, and Yammer work together to provide a global collaboration platform.

• Finding your collaboration sweet spot with Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint, Teams, and Yammer

See also

Microsoft 365 security documentation

Microsoft Purview documentation