How does one Spring Clean a Microsoft 365 tenant? We’re glad you asked! One of the initiatives of our Spring Clean month at Rencore is a special webinar, where we help you with tips and resources to tidy up your Microsoft 365 tenant.
This year, Microsoft MVP and Rencore’s Global Director of Partners & Alliances Ragnar Heil and Microsoft MVP & Microsoft Regional Director Christian Buckley jointly hosted the webinar that garnered a lot of interest.
In this blog, we answer the questions we received during and after the webinar so that you can better understand why decluttering your tenant is something you need to prioritize.
Absolutely not! Cloud sprawl could actually be a good thing, because it shows that people are using the technology you have implemented. But what’s important is to have ‘managed sprawl’. That’s exactly what governance does. You can’t just let the sprawl accumulate and build up. You need to manage everything that’s created.
Exactly. It could be that you’re sharing a link to the Team, it could be that you have external people in there who are no longer with the organization. What does oversharing look like? There is a large team, they’re doing a lot of collaborating and someone starts inviting more people. The Teams channel for instance, could be open to external guests.
In a lot of cases, even if it is closed to external guests, they start inviting internal users who are not directly part of the said project or effort, and it starts to get broader views. Most likely, there might be sensitive information there, so being aware of who is been added and by whom gets tricky.
It is not uncommon to see organizations spending time on writing and defining permission concepts, but after a while, it gets broken up because people find the share button too easily and this disrupts all the permission settings previously designed.
Interestingly enough, clutter is also a cost topic. Organizations tend to be historically bad at lifecycle management. Storage has always been an issue because of how expensive it can get. Here, we’re not saying that your storage inside SharePoint or M365 is costly, we’re rather talking about external storage. Organizations have just adopted the habit of not properly managing and cleaning up on a regular basis.
In the past, storage was much easier - there was an expensive hot storage and the cheaper cold storage. But now, when everything is stored on Teams, OneDrive or SharePoint, we’re dealing with the expensive hot storage.
As an example, let’s take the case of PowerPoint presentations. People often do not take care of cleaning up the many PowerPoint versions, which could run into as many as twenty of thirty different versions, at a storage of say, 150 Megabyte. So, people are not usually in the habit of going in and cleaning up the versions they no longer need. It has come down to merely storing files and that creates cost, next to unused licenses. This creates unnecessary and non-transparent cost.
By default, only SharePoint Online is supported, but now there’s also copilot extensions. You can read more about the extensibility model for Copilot for Microsoft 365 here.
There are a lot of other players who only do SharePoint governance, or only do Teams governance. We cater for both SharePoint and Teams provisioning under our Enterprise licensing tier which you can try for free.
Have any more questions? You can now watch the complete recording of this webinar to learn more about cleaning up your Microsoft 365 tenant.