Take control of your M365 governance: Strategies and best practices

Christian Buckley 20 July 2023 4 min read

Taking control of Microsoft 365 governance means treating it as recurring work: audit the environment on a schedule, give Power Apps and Power Automate their own lifecycle and licensing strategy, review policies as the organization grows, and automate provisioning with templates and approvals. Rencore Governance is one control plane for that work.

Good governance is essential to the security, compliance, and effective management of your organization’s digital assets. In a recent webinar with fellow Microsoft MVP, Stacy Deere, we walked through examples of real-world Microsoft 365 governance, with Stacy providing examples of customer pitfalls and successes around four key areas. I also shared how Rencore Governance provides the necessary tools and capabilities to simplify governance processes, automate tasks, and maintain a proactive approach to Microsoft 365 governance.

By leveraging Rencore’s comprehensive features, customers, consulting partners, and managed service providers (MSPs) can empower their organizations to achieve robust governance across their Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform environments.

What is Real-World Governance?

In the realm of Microsoft collaboration, governance plays a vital role. However, many organizations tend to overlook governance until a problem arises. It is crucial to proactively understand and outline the constraints of your environment, including policies, regulations, and desired outcomes. Whether through a formal process or an informal collaboration among stakeholders, regular governance reviews and oversight of your systems and data are essential.

A common mistake that organizations make is thinking that because Microsoft develops tools and platforms that meet a number of security and compliance standards that their deployment of those Microsoft tools and platforms somehow makes them secure and compliant. Relying on the compliance of Microsoft does not guarantee that your organization is fully compliant.

Real-world governance requires audits, assessments, and a regular dialog across the various business and technical stakeholders.

40% of organizations delayed their Copilot rollout by three months or more over sprawl and oversharing (Gartner Impact of GenAI in the Digital Workplace Survey, 2024).

Taking Control

Here are four of the most critical areas to focus your Microsoft 365 governance efforts, and how Rencore can help you to be secure, compliant, and efficiently managed:

Run regular audits and assessments

Governance is an iterative process. You are continually assessing and learning about your environment, modifying your governance strategy as it grows and as user behaviors change.

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Rencore Governance provides a comprehensive overview of your Microsoft 365 environment by connecting to your services and consolidating the information into one central portal. By monitoring your environment, Rencore generates detailed and actionable reports and dashboards that offer timely insights to all stakeholders involved.

Create a Power Platform strategy

Power Apps and Power Automate are powerful tools within the Power Platform suite. However, creating solutions without a framework to monitor and review these solutions can lead to long-term problems, such as a failure to implement proper lifecycle management policies or to manage the premium licenses to create these automations. Rencore helps you audit, assess, report on, and automate the management of Power Apps and Power Automate. It can work alongside Microsoft’s Center of Excellence (CoE) or stand on its own.

Regularly review and adjust your policies

As organizations grow, managing inactive teams and groups, cleaning up unused accounts, and identifying unknown publicly shared content becomes increasingly challenging. Rencore simplifies this process by providing out-of-the-box actionable dashboards and reports. It also offers hundreds of pre-built policy templates and automations, allowing you to monitor and review your environment on a regular schedule. Moreover, you have the flexibility to modify existing components or create new reports, policies, or automations on the fly.

Automate processes, starting with provisioning

Instead of allowing end users to create anything, anywhere, provide your organization with guardrails in place. To ensure consistency and standardization, Rencore allows you to create reusable templates for Teams and SharePoint deployments.

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With standardized templates, approval processes, and lifecycle management, you can automate your provisioning process. This streamlines operations and improves efficiency while ensuring adherence to governance policies.

Rencore Governance empowers you to scale your governance approach across various Microsoft services, including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Azure, Exchange, Viva Engage, and the Power Platform. By monitoring end-user activity and identifying deviations from best practices, you can take quick action to create and enforce policies, manage permissions and licensing costs, and protect your data.

Conclusion

Rencore Governance serves as an incredibly powerful tool for customers and partners seeking to automate Microsoft 365 governance processes. Be sure to watch the on-demand recording of our most recent webinar “5 Strategies for Conquering M365 Governance” and then sign up for our free trial!

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Common questions on this

How often should we audit our Microsoft 365 environment?

There is no universal interval, so set one that matches how fast your environment changes and write it down. Each review should look at the same things: inactive Teams and groups, unused accounts, publicly shared content, and the Power Apps and Power Automate solutions with their premium licences. Add event-driven reviews on top of the schedule, for example before a Copilot rollout, after a reorganisation or after an acquisition.

Does Microsoft's own compliance certification make our Microsoft 365 deployment compliant?

No. Microsoft builds its platforms to meet a range of security and compliance standards, but your deployment is yours: who can create Teams and sites, what is shared externally, who owns what and how long it is kept. Relying on Microsoft's compliance does not guarantee that your organization is compliant. The platform is the foundation, and the configuration, the sharing and the ownership on top of it are your responsibility.

Which Power Platform objects get forgotten first when a maker leaves?

The ones nobody is watching. Without a framework to monitor and review solutions, abandoned flows, unmanaged licences and apps nobody can explain build up quietly. Give every app and flow a lifecycle and a named owner, and keep track of the premium licences that automations consume, so that ownership moves to someone else when a maker leaves instead of being discovered later. Rencore Governance can work alongside Microsoft's Center of Excellence (CoE) or stand on its own, so the strategy does not depend on one particular toolset.

Who should approve a new Team or site, and how fast?

Put the approval inside the provisioning template instead of a separate ticket queue. The template decides what a new Team or site looks like, and the approval step confirms an owner and a purpose before it exists. Keep that step quick, because it is far cheaper to start a workspace in a governed state than to fix it afterwards, and slow approvals push people to create anything anywhere. Who approves depends on your organisation, but every new workspace should leave the step with an owner and a lifecycle.

How do we find inactive teams and publicly shared content?

Microsoft gives you individual signals, such as group expiration policies, SharePoint sharing reports and, with SharePoint Advanced Management, inactive-site and site-ownership policies for SharePoint. What they do not give you is one view across Teams, groups, SharePoint and OneDrive that joins activity, sharing and ownership, and acts on it. Rencore Governance consolidates that information in one portal with out-of-the-box dashboards and policy templates, so you can review inactive teams, unused accounts and unknown public sharing on a regular schedule and then take action.

Will governance slow our users down?

Governance that blocks everything gets bypassed, and bypassing creates the sprawl you were trying to prevent. Guardrails work differently: templates and approvals make the compliant route the quick one, and reviews on a schedule catch drift without anyone having to ask permission for routine work. The aim is that people can create what they need and IT still knows what exists, who owns it and when it should be reviewed.

Last updated 12 November 2026

About the author

Christian Buckley

Christian is Director of Partner Management for the North American market at Rencore. He is both a Microsoft Regional Director and long-standing Office Servers and Services Microsoft MVP. Christian is also Founder and CEO of CollabTalk LLC, an independent analyst and technical marketing services company based in Salt Lake City, Utah.