Category: Microsoft Teams

SpherShield adds Archive, Export, and Move Channels to Microsoft Teams

Post author By Yoav
Post date October 29, 2019

SphereShield adds Archive, Export, and Move Channels to Microsoft Teams.

AGAT Software team

AGAT has extended the capabilities of its premier product, Sphere

Shield by addressing the two top user needs marked as backlog, as communicated by current Teams users, on the Microsoft UserVoice forum.

Archiving Channels with 9K votes as of October 2019
Moving Channels with 10K votes as of October 2019

Users need the ability to archive a channel when it is no longer needed to avoid the usage of Teams becoming cluttered and handle the limit of 200 channels per Team. Channels cannot be deleted as information is needed for the long term. Teams does not offer an export into other formats which makes deleting of a channel not relevant. Also moving channels is an essential need to address changes in projects and re-structuring with time.

Archiving Channels

Users from diverse fields have communicated various reasons behind their need to archive channels. Many projects that are managed through channels in Teams are short term and dynamic, such as tenders, incidents, and mini-projects. Once they have been completed and or resolved, organizations may need to keep records for legal reasons or as reference for future projects.

Companies adopting agile practices, working with short iterations expect to create dozens of channels per month in a Team. When these projects have been completed the result is a plethora of inactive channels. With a limit of two hundred channels, the channel maximum can easily be reached in a short time.

SphereShield now allows users of Microsoft Teams to archive channels that are no longer active which will allow organizations to retain valuable information for reference, evidence, or later use. Once the channel has been archived it can be deleted from its original team thus maintaining an uncluttered platform that allows managers and team members to focus on active priorities.

Moving Channels

There are multiple reasons that organizations need to be able to move channels. Nothing is static including the organizations themselves. With organizational changes, the need may arise to limit access to specific channels or to move channels to different teams.

With any project, one cannot always anticipate how it will evolve, channels may become specified to different teams or require different access. Occasionally a channel may be set up and as the project develops it becomes clear that the channel structure is not suitable to the end goal. Many users have expressed reticence to create channels due to the fear of a resultant obsolete channel.

AGAT SphereShield users will have the ability to manage their channels by moving channels between teams to improve the flow of information and productivity. Users can now confidently start collaborating using channels, knowing that these can be moved as needed to address any change requirement

Exporting Channels

In addition to being able to archive and move channels, there may be organizational needs to move the data within channels to an unchangeable format such as a PDF document. Up until now, that has not been possible while working within Teams channels. There is also no simple way to copy and paste all of the channel content.

AGAT has addressed this by providing an option to export a channel to a PDF document that can then be stored and or shared, according to priority by the organization.

AGAT Software is keeping pace with the evolution of Teams and the needs of the end-user. The new features of SphereShield will further enhance functionality, increase usability, productivity, and adoption of Microsoft Teams.

SphereShield’ channel management be implemented online or on-site.

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Microsoft Teams

Are Microsoft Teams Default Security and Compliance Tools Good Enough?

Post author By Yoav
Post date May 19, 2019

Are Microsoft Teams Default Security and Compliance Tools Good Enough?

AGAT Software team

Microsoft Teams is a fast-growing communication and collaboration platform for business use. As of the end of 2018, Teams has overtaken Slack and became the market leader and is now used by more than 329,000 organizations worldwide.

While Microsoft Teams is an open platform that offers a vast range of collaboration options from any device, allowing such an accessible platform comes with compliance and security challenges.

Companies deploying Teams need to make sure they are as protected as possible. We have covered in the past some of the security and compliance challenges that should be addressed when moving to Teams. Let’s dive deeper into this.

Sensitive Data Loss

The very collaborative benefits that employees love can be a major headache for security and compliance teams. Sure, sharing files at the tip of your finger is great for workflows, but how do you make sure sensitive data isn’t being shared? Preventing data leakage or loss is a must have when controlling risk with Teams.

While Microsoft Office 365 offers some rudimentary DLP (Data Loss Prevention) capabilities, they are often not sufficiently effective. Content is usually inspected after it is sent and not in real time. Content can’t be blocked or masked based or organization-wide policies. If you wish to detect and protect sensitive data from leakage you may want to look for a third-party solution, like SphereShield.

Advanced DLP tools usually offer build-in rule templates that prevent data such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and ID numbers from being shared. Additional rules that are specific for your organization (like a secret project name) can always be added as well. You may want to invest in a solution like SphereShield that is tailor-made for Microsoft Teams, and can inspect content according to specific Teams functionalities or integrate a company’s existing DLP solutions that may not cover Teams.

External users

Collaboration with external business partners can be a dangerous proposition if left unchecked. Getting a handle on who can join these messaging applications is critical to preventing data loss and staying compliant with regulation.

Microsoft Teams allows users outside your organisation to communicate with your employees. You have control over which domains can communicate with users from your company but that’s about it. You don’t have granular control.

These messaging policies are not enough. They are applied per user (not per group) and are not context aware. They do not change based on participants or scopes. For example, if settings are set to block a user’s file sharing capabilities, he won’t be able to share files neither internally nor externally. That means you can’t limit an employee from communicating with external users in a specific, tailor-made way.

When federating with external companies, you may wish to control two aspects:

Who can communicate with whom
How they can communicate

SphereShield’s Ethical Wall can be used for this purpose. Policies can be applied on users, groups or domains (that solves the “who” part). In addition, granular modality policies help control communication capabilities such as IM, File transfer, Meeting, Audio, Video and more. Ethical Wall policies can be created to control both intra organisation communication as well is inter organisation communication.

Offline eDiscovery Archiving

Most companies today face compliance regulation requiring them to archive information in an accessible way. This is sometime even more challenging for international organizations. Different data laws and consent requirements impact cross-border eDiscovery management. Just as some of the security and compliance concerns, we already covered in this article, Microsoft does offer an eDiscovery module for O365, which inspects also Teams. However, the advanced eDiscovery is not free and requires the E5 license. Furthermore, even if you invest in the license, you may want to consider archiving data on-site and not in the cloud. That decision should depend on how sensitive the information your company handles is. If you wish to store eDiscovery archives on prem, you would need to invest in an alternative solution to Microsoft.

SphereShield’ eDiscovery. Can be implemented online or on-site.

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Microsoft Teams

3 Questions to Ask Before Deploying Microsoft Teams

Post author By Yoav
Post date February 25, 2019

3 Questions to Ask Before Deploying Microsoft Teams

By AGAT Software team

The ways organizations collaborate vary these days more than ever. The generational divide in the workplace has many employees working with a mix of device types and preferring different modes of interaction. Employees expect modern communication facilities that traditional enterprise-wide collaboration tools just aren’t up to.

Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s answer to competing platforms such as Slack and Atlassian’s HipChat. It provides the slick user experience that employees have come to expect, from their regular usage of personal communications platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Telegram.

The core feature of Microsoft Teams allows users to set up teams, each of which is essentially a hub for group chat rooms, which are called channels.

However, Microsoft has been pushing the platform as being more than just a chat hub. Teams is integrated with Microsoft’s online office suite, Office 365. That means it’s tied to other Microsoft Office services, such as Word and Excel, as well as its cloud storage and sharing services such as SharePoint. PowerPoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are also integrated with Teams.

Trying to solve every collaboration and communication need to ensure engagement and productivity with a single tool is probably not the right approach. At the other end of the spectrum, having too many tools and too many options can also impact adoption, productivity and business efficiencies. Organizations need to find a balance – and use the right tool for the job. Microsoft Teams is an ambitious solution which can bridge existing ways of collaborating with more modern modes, notably chat.

Teams Security – what’s lacking?

As Microsoft Teams gains more feature parity with Skype for Business and eventually replaces it as the dominant intelligent communications platform, it’s important to consider three obstacles your IT team may face when deploying this application.

1) Security and Compliance Challenges

Comparing Microsoft Teams to Skype for Business isn’t really a one to one comparison. Skype is primarily used for calls, meetings and instant messaging, and though you can share documents through a chat, content sharing has never been its primary focus. You have SharePoint for that.

Teams, on the other hand, is inherently content-centric. With SharePoint running in the background, Teams easily brings together content and communication.
This type of collaborative environment creates challenges for security since you not only have to consider how to secure communications, as you would with Skype for Business, but also how to get a handle on document storage and sharing. And let’s not forget about compliance and retention. The content that users create and store within Teams should still follow your corporate retention policies.

The demand for mobility is high, and since Teams is also built to be easily accessible on any device, that means that anyone in your organization may access any content anywhere. So how do you stop a user from downloading a proprietary presentation onto their personal device and then sharing it freely?
IT Security needs to think about not only protecting the network and the device, but also the content that’s shared on the platforms that are now widely available. This is where solutions like DLP (Data Loss Prevention) tools come into play. By creating policies controlling the sharing of sensitive information, IT can ensure that important data never gets into the wrong hands.

Though Teams offers some DLP capabilities, those aren’t on par with existing DLP solutions by vendors who Specialize in this field. Companies with existing DLP policies should look into integrating them into Teams, instead of creating new policies.

SphereShield allows integrating Teams with existing DLP policies and blocking or replacing any sensitive data.

If your business manages confidential information, you’re probably already thinking about how to manage and protect data that needs to remain HIPAA and GDPR compliant. With the multitude of third-party applications that can connect to Teams, such as a CRMs loaded with contact information, you need to be prepared with a solution that keeps your organization in compliance with data protection regulations.

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2) IT Administration Challenges

Everyone’s favorite word: governance. It’s an important one. When laying the foundation for a successful Microsoft Teams experience, your IT team needs to determine how to handle the creation of Office 365 Groups and how to manage the teams that may expire or become irrelevant in your organization.

According to Microsoft, “By default, all users with a mailbox in Exchange Online have permissions to create Office 365 groups and therefore a team within Microsoft Teams”. That means the IT admins are no longer the only ones in-charge of creating groups and setting up their permissions.

However, there’s an easy solution to tighten these permissions and not give up control. You can set up a group for specific users and grant only those users the rights to create other Office 365 groups. Controlling which users are permitted to create and manage groups allows you to delegate authority without compromising security or compliance.

3) End User and Change Management

Employees need to have a thorough understanding of how and when to use Teams versus other Office 365 applications, ideally with Teams as their first choice.

It’s also important to have a plan for how you’ll roll out the Teams client to your end users’ machines. Using your security and asset management system, you should be able to do this through a group policy, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft Systems Center. The last thing you want is for your support queue to overflow with tickets from users who can’t find the application on their laptop.

You can ease Teams adoption pain by enabling it side-by-side with Skype for Business. Especially until complete feature parity exists, we highly recommend running them simultaneously so that end users don’t become frustrated and resistant to Teams as a whole.

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