Set Up Microsoft Teams With Your Company Bookmarks — Navo

Sean Wallbridge - The Chief Troublemaker

5 min readJan 21, 2020

Microsoft Teams is a fantastic tool for modern workplace collaboration, but Teams projects can require extensive budget due to the planning required and inter-dependencies with SharePoint and the rest of Office 365.

If you remove the teams from Microsoft Teams and add Navo to the sidebar instead, you’ll be able to leverage all of the modern benefits Teams has to offer while giving your people an easy way to maneuver through all of the different tools they use.

If you don’t have a Navo subscription yet, we think this is a great use case to try it out on our free 30-day trial. 😉

Why Does My Company Need Bookmarks in Teams?

Put simply, adding Navo to Teams is like adding bookmarks to Teams that are centrally managed by your organization.

Employees often rely on bookmarks to find what they need to do their jobs. If they are not on their regular work device or their computer has been reset, this can lead to frustration and time wasted. While many web browsers offer the option to sign in to retrieve bookmarks, Navo can be accessed from any browser at any time with your existing Office 365 account.

Each new tool, service, webpage, and any other helpful link used within your company can be added to Navo so that people no longer have to remember to update their own links.

If your company is new to Microsoft Teams, making the resources that you already use accessible from inside Microsoft Teams will help to make the transition smoother.

If you want to roll out Microsoft Teams with your company bookmarks, it can be done in four simple steps:

Set up Microsoft Teams without the teams
Add Navo to Microsoft Teams
Set up your company bookmarks
Go live!

This blog post will walk you through each of those steps.

Set Up Microsoft Teams Without the Teams

The following steps walk through our approach toward setting up Microsoft Teams without the teams. If further technical guidance is needed, step by step instructions on how to roll out Microsoft Teams can be found in the Microsoft Teams documentation on the Microsoft website.

Step 1: Lock Down the Creation of Office 365 Groups

Microsoft Teams are built on Office 365 Groups. By default, any user in an organization can create an Office 365 group through Microsoft Teams, Planner, and various other channels.

Because Office 365 groups create SharePoint team sites, Outlook inboxes, and various other resources as they are created, allowing any user in your organization to create groups can result in big data governance problems that can be expensive and difficult to reverse.

Follow these instructions from Microsoft to lock down Office 365 group creation.

Step 2: Start the Transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams

This feature comparison table demonstrates how Microsoft Teams is leaps and bounds better than Skype for Business for meetings, chat, and even to replace your phone system.

When you’re ready to make the transition, use these in-depth resources from Microsoft to guide you through the process.

Step 3: Customize the Teams Sidebar

Go into the Microsoft Teams admin center and find Teams apps in the sidebar.

Next, navigate to Setup policies (also under Teams apps). Click on Global (Org-wide default) and edit the Pinned apps — these are the apps that show up in the Teams sidebar.

The Move up and Move down buttons will change the order that your apps show up in your Microsoft Teams sidebar.

Remove Teams from Pinned apps and any other apps that you do not wish to see in the Microsoft Teams sidebar. Note that any apps that you have removed from your pinned apps will still be accessible from Microsoft Teams through the ellipses menu at the bottom of the sidebar. However, if group creation is locked down and no teams exist, the Teams menu item will be useless.

Add Your Company Bookmarks to Microsoft Teams

Navo is like a centralized Bookmarks location, managed by your company, that links to the different websites and tools that you use.

Departments can keep their folders and links private from the rest of the company if they contain sensitive information.

It’s easy to add your company bookmarks to Microsoft Teams with the Navo app for Microsoft Teams. After setting up your bookmarks in Navo, go to the Microsoft Teams admin center and find Teams apps in the sidebar.

Next, navigate to Setup policies (also under Teams apps). Click on Global (Org-wide default) and under Pinned apps, click Add apps.

Search for Navo in the Teams app store and click on the Add button. It may take up to an hour for your app to appear in the navigation pane.

After waiting an hour, check your Microsoft Teams sidebar to confirm that Navo — your company bookmarks — appears. Be sure to test this with a regular user account as well.