Metropolitan Council Responds To COVID-19 Work-from-Home Orders By Deploying Cloud Governance and Microsoft Teams
Success Highlights
Customer Location Minnesota, United States
Industry Public Sector
Platform Microsoft 365
The Metropolitan Council is the regional policy-making body, planning agency, and provider of essential services for the Twin Cities metropolitan region. The Met Council and its 5,000 employees provide essential services and infrastructure – Metro Transit’s bus and rail system, Metro Mobility, Transit Link, wastewater treatment services, regional parks, planning, affordable housing to support communities and businesses to ensure a high quality of life for its residents.
Critical Needs
- Multiple Teams provisioning approaches within a single tenant
- Secure, compliant and auditable collaboration within Teams
- Ability to support surge in remote work
The Challenge
Metropolitan Council started to roll out Microsoft Teams in July 2019 following its SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online migration with AvePoint.
”Our move to Teams made sense as we were re-organizing and re-architecting SharePoint sites and our collaboration needs. From that point, we have been slowly rolling out features available in Teams,” said Jeff Godderz, ECM Architect Metropolitan Council.
Metropolitan Council decided to leverage AvePoint’s Cloud Governance to support its Microsoft Teams deployment because of its functionality to automatically enforce critical governance components of a Team or SharePoint site such as naming conventions, lifecycle, permissions, and ownership. The organization also needed to have a more tailored provisioning process for each of its council departments.
“We have five council departments, with five different cultures and it seems like all of them had different ideas for managing Teams self-provisioning,” said Godderz. “One wanted self-service creation enabled, one wanted to route to IT for approval, and all want more control over getting resources as quickly as possible.”
The original plan was to deploy AvePoint Cloud Governance in gradual stages to enhance Microsoft Teams governance. However, in March COVID-19 hit the United States and state governors, including the Governor of Minnesota, started issuing work from home orders for state employees.
We went live with AvePoint Cloud Governance on March 15, 2020 via a schedule crash to allow the organization to make Teams since the Governor of Minnesota closed schools [in response to COVID]. We have some backlog, but the process has been working beautifully. Within one week we had a 20 percent increase in Teams created.
ECM Architect, Metropolitan Council
The AvePoint Solution
“We went live with AvePoint Cloud Governance on March 15, 2020 via a schedule crash to allow the organization to make Teams since the Governor of Minnesota closed schools [in response to COVID],” said Godderz. “We have some backlog, but the process has been working beautifully. Within one week we had a 20 percent increase in Teams created.”
Metropolitan Council leverages a custom questionnaire to guide their users to one of five different types of Team templates, each with a governance policy tailored to its use case.
“One of our challenges was to balance the needs of our security team with the needs of our end users,” said Godderz. “We wanted end users to be able to get what they need on their own. So we used the Cloud Governance tool for that and it really allowed us to move quickly with our security team.”
This “overnight” success was made possible through the close collaboration between Metropolitan Council and AvePoint’s in-house experts as part of an Advanced Quick Start services engagement.
This included designing and implementing specific use cases around provisioning, lifecycle, and reporting. Setting up the right reports for service request auditing and overall compliance was key.
The Road Ahead
AvePoint delivered the project on time and in the two months following the deployment of Cloud Governance:
- Meetings and chats increased 800 percent
- Emails decreased 21 percent
- Channel conversations went up 400 percent
- Overall activity in Microsoft Teams went up 221 percent
- More than 350 Teams have been automatically provisioned by Cloud Governance
