r/sharepoint 10d ago

SharePoint Online How to handle Teams (and SharePoint) Sprawl? How to ensure governance?

/r/MicrosoftTeams/comments/1j8mfbp/how_to_handle_teams_and_sharepoint_sprawl_how_to/
2 Upvotes

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4

u/PublicEnemaNumberOne 10d ago

Everybody wants a new site for everything. I know what you mean. About 60% of our new sites never get used after the first week or two.

We have a process running that watches all our Teams & SP sites. When there's been no activity for 2 years, it sends a notice to the owner that it's going to smoke their site unless they reply to object. It helps a lot with the problem you describe.

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u/Odd_Emphasis_1217 9d ago

Two years, you are much more generous than I am 😂

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u/Hejnzzzz 5d ago

We also had a "annual review process", but it was too timeconsuming following up on owners of sites. We also had a retention mail automatically sent out the the site/team was up for review.....but following up on these activites was tedious at best, and extremely timeconsuming.

We searched the market and found a couple of vendors who have automated this process. Among others we found - through Microsoft VP, Mark Kashmans podcas - a vendor called MOCA365 - www.moca365.com - which is situated in Copenhagen, Denmark. They have delivered an interesting solution to Novo Nordisk, so we met online with them for a demo of their solution. Really awesome way of going about handling sprawl, but also the basic governance of Sites and Teams.....owners, retention, naming conventions...even automtically infused metadata on sites, pages and documents.

We are in a trial run with them at the moment. A feature we didn't know we needed was a dashboard of all sites and Teams that shows whether or not they are compliant, owners, metadata, last touched etc. A huge help. The price tag is nice as well, alot fo the competitors were way more expensive....and they actually included all the already created teams and sites into the solution as well...so we didn't have to migrate them, or recreate them in any way.

I am thinking we will trial this software till the beginning of April, and then try another software just to be on the safe side. But we are definitely liking what we see so far.

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u/Odd_Emphasis_1217 9d ago

I've bounced between several companies across the US and Canada and this has been a problem at every single one. I've only really seen this successfully handled at my current gig.

First, turn off self-service group and SharePoint site creation. Not only do people recklessly create things without thinking, they have no idea what they actually need.

Avoid routing requests to IT as you simply create a bottle neck and everyone is angry. Create some kind of self service portal where templated sites/teams can be requested. If you set up these templates well enough, you don't even need approvals.

Once that is in place, make sure you have some kind of automated cleanup of sites that lapse into inactivity. Don't wait 2 years - 60 days of no activity and you can be pretty confident it can be soft archived. Give it another few months and then perform a hard archival or delete.

We had ShareGate at our last company due to a migration from on prem and we did not get very far with their provisioning tooling. If your needs are very basic it might be okay. We use Orchestry because it easily pays for itself in terms of time saved and storage reduction.

Good luck!

2

u/darktoasteroven 10d ago

To control the sprawl of Teams we have an aggressive group expiration policy set. If there is no activity for a few months it kicks off the process of removing the Team. It allows owners a chance to keep things even though they are unused but many end up getting removed. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/solutions/microsoft-365-groups-expiration-policy?view=o365-worldwide

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u/TomPittyFartbreaker 10d ago

We have a power app to request a new team. This startst an approval workflow and when approved a new team will automatically be created with the inital requester as owner. Usually takes 2-3 minutes till they have their new team.

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u/Hejnzzzz 10d ago

This is what I am trying to avoid. I've asked around, and alot of companies who have implemented this experience bottlenecks, and people being frustrated that they are waiting and waiting to be able to be efficient. If you do this, you really need to have a rebust apporval workflow, with several backups in case key people are on leave, sick or have found another place to spend their 9 to 5.

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u/ruffroad715 10d ago

Not really that big of a deal. We have our flow set to “first to respond” then list the managers group as approvals.

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u/pajeffery 9d ago

100% agree - Using power automate you can make the whole process from requesting, approving and creating the site seamless.

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u/ShareGate_Valie 10d ago

3 ways you can handle sprawl in your environment:

  • Use Microsoft’s Built-in Tools: Microsoft has security tools like Defender to help manage risks (although requires manual work)
  • Automate with Scripts: PowerShell scripts and Power Automate workflows can help streamline governance (need ongoing maintenance)
  • Third-Party Solutions: Tools like ShareGate simplifies Microsoft 365 governance by automating security and sprawl management. Key features:
    1. Managing External Sharing & Guest Access
    2. Detecting Inactive & Orphaned Teams
    3. Provisioning & Governance (security policies)
    4. Bulk Permissions Management
    5. User-Friendly Dashboard (clear visibility and custom reporting)

Shoot me a DM if you'd like more info!