Deep Dive: Linking SharePoint Sites to Teams and Monitoring New Team Creation
Many IT administrators want to integrate Microsoft Teams and SharePoint for easier content sharing, along with tight security monitoring around team creation. Let’s break down how to handle each scenario, with a focus on real limitations and smart configuration.
Making Sales Site Content Available in Teams (With Automatic Channel Folders)
The Problem
You have a SharePoint Online team site, “Sales,” storing important documents. You want to access those documents from Teams and, when you make a new channel in your Team, automatically create a folder in the Sales site’s document library for that channel.
Where Simple Solutions Fall Short
It’s tempting to think that creating a team “from a group or team” in the Teams client will link everything, since both Teams and modern SharePoint sites share group membership.
However, this doesn’t fully work:
- When you create a team based on an existing Microsoft 365 group, Teams automatically creates a new associated SharePoint site for that Team, rather than using the pre-existing Sales team site.
- Any new channel you add will create a folder in the Team’s new SharePoint site, not in your original Sales site.
- So, this solution doesn’t meet the goal.
What Actually Works
To achieve tight, automatic integration:
- Create your Team directly from the SharePoint site UI.
- Go to your Sales SharePoint site and click “Add Microsoft Teams.” This links the existing site to the team, so new channels and their folders always appear in the Sales site’s document library.
- Or, use advanced PowerShell or Graph API scripting
- Attach a Teams-enabled group directly to the Sales SharePoint site, ensuring all new Teams channels correspond to folders inside the correct library.
By doing this, you guarantee content is always accessible from Teams and every channel maps to a folder inside Sales.
Monitoring New Team Creation: Alerting Administrators
Why You Need Alerts
If new teams are being created, especially using “Build a team from scratch,” it’s important for security and compliance to notify an administrator. If left unchecked, unauthorized teams could appear without oversight.
The Right Way to Do It
- Don’t rely on templates, global policies, or user supervision features; they won’t give you real-time creation alerts.
- Instead, use the Security & Compliance admin center’s alert policies.
- You can define an alert to trigger every time a new Team is created.
- Customize the notification so your IT or security lead gets an email or in-console alert instantly.
How to Set It Up
- Go to Security & Compliance admin center.
- Navigate to Alert policies.
- Create a new policy that watches for “New Team creation” events.
- Set your chosen admin(s) to receive notifications.
You now have a proactive way to monitor and respond to potentially risky or unauthorized team creation.
Key Takeaways
- Don’t assume Teams and SharePoint integration is automatic. Always link teams from inside your SharePoint site or with advanced scripting if you need tight directory mapping.
- Rely on built-in alert policies for direct, real-time notifications when new teams are created, enabling faster response and better control over your Microsoft 365 environment.
Understanding these limits and capabilities is key to maximizing security, usability, and compliance in the Teams + SharePoint ecosystem.
