Many organizations that use Box need to standardize all of their organization's content in Box, especially when their users are sharing content with Teams. If this is true for your organization, you can choose one of the following options:
- Deploy a Box-only experience for all of your people who use Microsoft.
- Deploy a Box-only experience for some of your people who use Microsoft.
- Deploy a Box-only experience for groups who use Microsoft.
What is a Box-only experience in Teams?
Having a Box-only experience provides users a more seamless file management experience by uploading and sharing files directly from Box within your Teams channels and chats while removing SharePoint and OneDrive as default storage from within Microsoft Teams.
Now, you and your team can seamlessly manage your files across all of your applications and access them through Teams, Box web, Box drive, or any other Box connected application.
When you hide the the OneDrive and SharePoint entry points, the following are unavailable in Microsoft Teams:
- the paperclip icon in message extensions
- the Files tab
- dragging-and-dropping a file directly to OneDrive or SharePoint.
Hiding the the OneDrive and SharePoint entry points does not disable OneDrive or SharePoint, but enables people to solely use Box.
How do I enable a Box-only experience?
As an O365 Admin, you can use the below PowerShell script to establish a Box-only experience for all Teams users in your tenant.
Pre-requisite:
Follow these instructions from the Microsoft Docs sites on using PowerShell commands in Teams. Once complete, proceed by copying and pasting the following script to enable the Box-only experience.
If needed, you can also disable the experience, or see the policy files for this enablement.
Note: After you make changes to your organization's Teams policy, those changes may take up to 12 hours to appear in your organization's Teams clients.
PowerShell Script
Hiding NativeFileEntryPoints for your entire organization
Setting the -Identity parameter to Global applies the policy settings to everyone in your organization.
To turn on NativeFileEntryPoints:
Set-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity Global -NativeFileEntryPoints Enabled
To turn off NativeFileEntryPoints:
Set-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity Global -NativeFileEntryPoints Disabled
To get current status of tenant's Teams Files policy:
Get-CsTeamsFilesPolicy
Hiding NativeFileEntryPoints for individuals or groups
You create a new Teams file policy by assigning a name of your choice to the parameter Identity, and assigning the newly created policy to specific individuals or groups.
After creating the new policy, you enable or disable the Box-only experience for individuals or groups.
To create a policy for individuals or a group, with native entry points disabled by default:
For individuals:
New-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity UserPolicy -NativeFileEntryPoints Disabled
For a group:
New-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity TeamsFilesPolicy -NativeFileEntryPoints Disabled
To assign the new Teams file policy to a specific individual or group:
For a specific individual:
Grant-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -identity "user email id" -PolicyName UserPolicy
For a group:
Grant-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -GroupId [Group ID] -PolicyType TeamsFilesPolicy - PolicyName TeamsFilesPolicy
To enable or disable the new Teams files policy:
Enable NativeFileEntryPoints for individuals:
Set-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity UserPolicy -NativeFileEntryPoints Enabled
Enable NativeFileEntryPoints for groups:
Set-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity TeamsFilePolicy -NativeFileEntryPoints Enabled
Disable NativeFileEntryPoints for individuals:
Set-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity UserPolicy -NativeFileEntryPoints Disabled
Disable NativeFileEntryPoints for groups:
Set-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity TeamsFilePolicy -NativeFileEntryPoints Disabled
To get current status of tenant's Teams Files policy:
For individuals:
Get-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity UserPolicy
For groups:
Get-CsTeamsFilesPolicy -Identity TeamsFilesPolicy
To get all policies assigned to a specific group:
Get-CsGroupPolicyAssignment -GroupId [Group ID]
To get all groups assigned to a specific Teams policy:
Get-CsGroupPolicyAssignment -PolicyType TeamsFilesPolicy
Learn more
To learn more about assigning policies in Microsoft Teams, click here.