Microsoft Teams – Governance – Part 2- naming policy – Why naming policies are one of the important decision point in Teams Governance? / Limitations / Best practices

Hi All,

Greetings for the day 🙂 LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂

We are discussing Microsoft Teams governance. In last article we discussed Microsoft Teams – Governance – Part 1 – Preparation / Plan we discussed

• What is governance
• What is Teams governance
• Planning for Teams governance
• How to plan Teams governance and which decisions need to be taken

If you still did not got a chance to read above article, please have a look once. The given article is prerequisite 🙂

We also started discussing setting naming policies for Teams (Microsoft 365 Groups) by OOB approach (through Azure Active Directory admin center) – https://knowledge-junction.in/2021/09/17/microsoft-365-groups-teams-governance-enforcing-naming-policies-from-azure-active-directory-admin-center/

In this article we will discuss about more details about setting naming policies / conventions / limitations / best practices

Take away from this article :

• What is mean by naming policies for Teams / Groups
• Why it is necessary to set the naming policies
• What are OOB option available for setting up naming policy / convention for Microsoft Teams / M365 groups
• Custom solution available for setting up naming policies / conventions
• Best practices while applying naming conventions
• Limitations / Restriction while setting blocked words
• Administrators who are exempted from the Team / Group naming policies

Why it is necessary to set the naming policies :

• To have consistent naming for Teams (Microsoft 365 Groups) across our organization / company
• A naming policy helps to easily identify Teams and their respective function / reason for the Team (Microsoft 365 Groups) / members of the Team (Microsoft 365 Groups) / Who created the Team (Microsoft 365 Groups) / For what purpose Team (Microsoft 365 Groups) is created and so on
• Naming policies helps to categorize Groups in address book

Naming policy for Teams :

• As discussed in our last Teams governance article, while planning to Teams governance one of the decision point is having naming conventions for my Teams (Microsoft 365 groups)
• Decisions to be taken for naming conventions are
  • Are there any need to set naming conventions are set for Teams (Microsoft 365 Groups) in my organization / company
  • Is there any Teams naming policy is in place in my organization
• How to set naming conventions for Teams OOB way :
  • By enforcing group naming policy
    • We can enforce group naming policies through “Azure Active Directory admin center”
    • We have detailed discussion on this in our previous article – Microsoft 365 / Groups – Teams Governance : Enforcing naming policies from Azure Active Directory admin center

• Custom Implementation approach :
  • Limitations with OOB approach :
    • Like Suffix / Prefix need to be specify hardcoded or limited options available for dynamic naming convention as shown in above fig
    • But what if we want naming conventions based on more properties or with our custom user defined properties like based on Business unit / Technology / Postal Code and so on
    • Also prefixes and suffixes length is restricted to 53 characters
  • To have dynamic naming convention we need to have custom implementation
  • For custom implementation we could have multiple approaches :
    • Custom form to create Teams like as follows few examples
    • We could have Power App forms / SPFX component / Microsoft Form
    • On form submission we could have logic to apply our custom naming logic / convention
    • We could have approval process in place
    • We could put request in list where approval flow can be applied or our custom job (Azure web job) to apply logic

Best practices for applying naming conventions :

• Use short strings as suffix
• Use attributes with values
• Total name length has a maximum of 264 characters
• Upload your organization specific blocked words

Limitations / Restriction while setting blocked words :

• The blocked words are not case-insensitive
• When a user enters a blocked word, the Team / Group client will show an error message with the blocked word as we seen in previous article
• There are no character restrictions in the blocked words used
• There is a limit of 5000 words that can be set as blocked words

Administrators who are exempted from the Team / Group naming policies :

• Global admin
• Partner Tier 1 Support
• Partner Tier 2 Support
• User account admin

Thanks for reading this article 🙂 STAY SAFE 🙂 STAY HEALTHY 🙂