Step 4 – Lifecycle and Archive

Four steps to Teams success

Every team has an end. And that’s a good thing, because if it didn’t, your tenant would be overflowing with new teams over the years.
Completed customer projects, 2018 company celebrations, or even disbanded departments simply don’t deserve to be part of your tenant any longer.
You now have three options for dealing with retired teams:

  1. Delete
  2. Archive (more specific: “freeze”)
  3. Archive documents

Many employees are hesitating before making use of the first option because they are afraid that some information or file from the team will still be needed at some point (which is often never the case). For this reason, it is popular to simply let teams exist forever – regardless of whether they are still actively collaborating or not.
In this case, archiving is the right approach.
Here, as a company, you can archive the entire team – it will then continue to exist in the tenant and will only be “frozen”, i.e. its content can no longer be changed.
In addition, such a team no longer appears in the client’s team list, which of course improves the order.
However, hundreds of archived teams can also become a burden, because the entire infrastructure also remains. After all, as explained in one of the basics articles, a team consists of much more than just the “team”, and often all these things are simply no longer needed.
So it can also be a relief to archive only the documents of a team and delete the team itself (together with all resources).
However, in the end only the owner of a team can decide this and there is probably no right or wrong here.

One thing is certain: As a company, think about the lifecycle of your teams. This lifecycle may be very long in certain categories (e.g. departments), but very short in others (e.g. event planning).
Train your employees – especially the owners – in the techniques necessary to keep your tenant looking clean and tidy 10 years from now.

All four steps are iterative

Once you’ve gone through all four steps, you’ll be dealing with a clean tenant in which your employees enjoy collaborating via Microsoft Teams.
However, the road to this goal is often a bit bumpy, because the larger a company is, the harder it is to guide all employees along the way and train them accordingly.
In addition, all four steps are meant to be “iterative.” That means you shouldn’t just go through them once, but over and over again.
Probably the first passes will be the hardest and take a lot of work. But with each time it gets easier and eventually you may only need to think about each step again 1x per year and possibly define new categories or rename or remove old ones.
After all, your company is alive and therefore your teams tenant should also be alive and constantly adapt to the new structures.

Go through all four steps with the GroupHive app

Once this is done, however, you will also need a technical platform with the help of which you can implement the ideas presented here.
One possible platform is the GroupHive app.
GroupHive is an app for teams that makes categorizing easier and wants to support you in implementing the strategy presented here.
Get a brief overview of all the features on the next page.

Good luck with Microsoft Teams in the future!