Provisioning for Office 365
Creation of objects & content within Office 365 Sites, Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams.
Provisioning
The Oxford English Dictionary defines provisioning as ‘the action of providing or supplying something for use’ and we could not agree more. In the context of Office 365, the provisioning of objects (mailboxes, sites, Groups, Teams, etc.) is a necessary element of operating the Office 365 platform. Without objects the construct of Office 365 would not support the purpose of Office 365 – communication & collaboration.
The challenge with provisioning is finding the balance. You want your users to be able to harness the capabilities of Office 365 without providing them leeway to create an unmanageable mess.
Microsoft have worked hard to make certain types of objects (for instance, Microsoft Teams) very easy to create. User empowerment is at the core of the Teams vision and so making creation simple is an obvious design decision for Microsoft to have made. The challenge with this simple creation model is that organisations can quickly be overwhelmed with Teams that serve little purpose and wither on the branch.
Management of the provisioning process is something that every organisation should be actively exploring and implementing and is one of the three core principles of alatrio’s Intelligent Information Management framework.
Control
Control the creation of objects within Office 365 with the aim of minimising sprawl, preventing object duplication and ensuring ‘purpose based creation’.
Enforce
Introduce and enforce process for object creation to increase efficiency within Office 365, improve the compliance position and enforce approval if needed.
Standardise
Leverage templates, frameworks and workflow to increase user engagement with Office 365 through familiarity and improved sense of ownership.
Latest Posts about Provisioning…
Do I need an Office 365 Group or a Microsoft Team?
The most asked question in the Modern Office 365 world has to be the one about Groups vs Teams.Which should you use? Is one better than the other?The Egyptians Knew BestFundamentally, the Groups vs Teams debate is a little bit moot. It is not really a 'versus'...
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Why Can Users Create Microsoft Teams?
Teams for All!Microsoft Teams can be created (by default) by anyone in your Office 365 tenant. Microsoft describes this as 'preventing IT staff being inundated with requests to create Teams' which although noble, is naive. The challenges brought in SharePoint (since...
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What is a PnP Template?
Simply put, a PnP Template is a schema compliant description of an object that can be provisioned or modified by the PnP provisioning engine, or any other tool (such as ProvisionPoint) that can make use of such a template.PnP templates are typically XML documents that...
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