Microsoft Teams has quickly emerged as one of the most popular tools for centralising and managing collaboration in the enterprise environment. In a world where employees are becoming increasingly mobile and dispersed, it's tools like Microsoft Teams that allow modern employees to stay connected wherever they are, without having to worry about things like email lag or lost phone signal.
However, there's still growth that needs to happen before Microsoft Teams can become the ultimate collaboration solution for every brand. Fortunately, companies like AGAT Software are responding to the needs of Microsoft Teams Users by further developing their flagship "SphereShield" security and compliance solution.
SphereShield from AGAT Software now offers tools such as export, archive, and the option to move channels between Teams. According to the CEO of AGAT Software, Yoav Crombie, the offering was designed to respond to the top compliance and functionality requirements expressed by the Microsoft Teams User Feedback Forum, UserVoice.
Introducing Microsoft Teams Channel Management
Yoav told me that SphereShield is a unified communications and collaboration solution designed to respond to the needs of today's teams. Customers need the simplicity and convenience that comes with team-based collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, but that doesn't mean that they want to compromise on privacy, security, or compliance.
"We extended the features of our premier product, SphereShield to address the two main user needs that we saw in the current environment. Current Teams users told us that they needed help with archiving and moving channels in the Teams environment"
Within the Microsoft Teams UserVoice forums, "archiving channels" was the issue with the second-highest number of votes (9k), while moving channels had the highest number of requests (10k). These issues were among the topics that are marked as ‘backlog’, which means that Microsoft hasn’t yet set a timeline for addressing them.
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Yoav Crombie[/caption]
"Today's users need the option to archive channels in their Microsoft Teams environment when they're no longer using them. This stops the Teams space from becoming overly cluttered, and it also means that companies can better manage their limit of up to 200 channels per team."
While deleting channels isn't an option, particularly when information in the collaborative space is needed for long-term purposes, archiving presents an excellent opportunity. Unfortunately, Teams doesn't offer a native export option to allow channels to be moved into different formats.
Archiving Channels with AGAT SphereShield
Just because businesses aren't necessarily using all of their channels anymore, doesn't mean that they want to get rid of that information forever. Users from a range of backgrounds have informed AGAT of their need to archive information. "Many of the projects that are handled through the channels in Microsoft Teams are dynamic and temporary in nature. They might include things like mini projects, incidents and tenders. Once those things have been resolved or completed, organisations may still need to keep a record of the information for legal reasons or for reference."
