Enabling your organization for safe online meetings and collaboration with Microsoft Teams

In 2020, remote work became the norm for most organizations around the world – a trend that is likely to continue in 2021. In fact, the percentage of workers permanently working from home is expected to double this year. With more than 115 million daily active users on Microsoft Teams, we’ve seen how organizations have truly empowered their employees with remote collaboration tools such as online meetings, chat and calls, and real-time document coauthoring. As remote collaboration continues to be business critical, how can IT and security operations teams enable productivity while safeguarding enterprise assets?

The Importance of end user training
In many ways, end users hold the key to protecting corporate assets because their actions or inactions can create inroads for cyber threats. Certainly, a data governance strategy and security tools like device management or automated information protection capabilities can help, but realistically, security operations can’t be involved in every action an end user makes. This makes end user training a vital element in any cyber security strategy.

For example, training end users to use sensitivity labels to classify content appropriately can significantly improve security and compliance. Many of our customers have rolled out sensitivity labels for email and trained their users to flag emails that contain sensitive business information so that they can be appropriately restricted to specific audiences.

In Teams, IT can enable easy-to-use security controls such as data encryption, data loss prevention, and secure guest access. But for these controls to work effectively, end users must be educated on when and how to appropriately use these security tools.

Providing accessible and consumable end user training
To promote a security-conscious work environment, many organizations provide end user training through a dedicated internal site, such as a Wiki or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, and then amplify this training through communication channels or organizational initiatives to reiterate and reinforce a security mindset. Creating an effective end user security training program can be difficult especially for IT teams that don’t have the capacity or capabilities to do so. Microsoft Teams video training is a helpful place to start.

Microsoft Teams training focused on safe online meetings and collaboration
With the influx in online collaboration, these new Microsoft Teams training assets are designed to help any user to take advantage of Teams security features and become Teams power users. Across the security-focused training, you’ll find three asset types:

	End user guides tailored to specific functions, such as how to mute attendees or create a new team
	Infographics that contain a collection of relevant actions or functions, like safe online meetings and collaboration controls
	Bite-sized videos demonstrating how to use Teams features

Here are some of the practical topics covered in these training assets:

• Meeting options available to every meeting creator to control who can join the meeting directly or who can present their screen (note that some meeting option defaults are set by IT)
• How to mute individual attendees or mute all attendees
• Understanding presenter vs. attendee meeting role and how to promote/demote attendees
• Creating a new Team using an IT-created sensitivity label to help regulate sensitive information contained in the team
• How to end a Teams meeting for all attendees
• Understanding Teams chat policy violations, such as a message being blocked due to sharing sensitive business information or violating internal organization policies

You can download and access the end user guides and infographics at the end of the post, while the bite-sized videos will be posted to the Microsoft Teams video training site.

Tips on using the Microsoft Teams training assets
The individual end user guides and bite-size training videos are ideal to host on a central training site for educating end users on how to use Teams features and functionality. The collective infographic helps group related security-focused functions together to help promote a security-conscious workforce.

In addition to hosting the assets on a centralized site, end user training is often more impactful when the resources available or specific training is communicated through regular intervals. This continues to help promote any centralized training site and assets while also directly sharing a useful tip, trick, or useful feature.

If you’ve recently rolled out Teams or are starting to scale adoption, more frequent communications such as a “Feature Friday” mail can help achieve a targeted training plan. This can be especially useful during an initial Teams rollout where general awareness of how to use Teams may be limited. Helping end users understand how to use Teams not only drives business productivity, but creates a frontline security defense of Teams power users!

For more depth learning and interactive training make sure to check out the latest Teams training on Microsoft Learn including a specific learning path on enforcing security, privacy, and compliance in Microsoft Teams!

End User Guides and Infographics