Preparing your organization's employees for Tricent

We have some pointers and experience as to how to introduce our tool to the employees in your organization.

Change management is hard since users have to learn a new way of doing things, which can be scary. That's why we recommend that you spend some time getting users ready before we start sending emails and doing bulk cleanups.

Explain that there is a new service coming

As new tools come, Tricent is very unthreatening. Make sure the users know that we will not delete anything and that we are just here to make life easier and safer for them. An outline of the initial communication could look something like this:

Hi {user},

 

In about a week, on {date}, we will be introducing a new tool to help you clean up shared files and teams in Office 365. When it starts running, you will receive emails detailing what externally shared files it currently wants to unshare, as well as when they will be unshared if you do nothing.

 

If you do not want the files or teams to be unshared, you can follow the link in those emails and extend the duration of the sharing. Don't worry about losing anything; the tool cannot delete files or teams - only share links.

 

When we get closer to the launch date, you will get a reminder about this, as well as details on a bulk cleanup, where we unshare all files and teams that have been shared but not modified for more than a year.

 

For now, there is nothing more for you to do, but we wanted to let you know that something is coming. If you want to learn more about the service, you can head over to support.tricent.com.

 

All the best,

Your friendly IT department

That, or something like it, should give a basic explanation of what is going on. It can be a good idea to have a statement about the dangers of sharing files externally for too long, coming from the top of the organization as well, to underline the importance.

Give a heads-up that users will start to receive emails about their shared files and teams being unshared

A few days before launch, follow up with another email detailing the communications they will receive from the Tricent tool, as well as what happens. 

Hi again {user},

As we notified you about recently, we are now rolling out a tool called Tricent in our organization.

This means that you will soon start receiving emails showing a list of files and teams about to be unshared automatically.

If you do not want these items to be unshared, you can simply click on the link in the email and extend their sharing.

There's a simple description of the process at support.tricent.com.

 

All the best, 

Your friendly IT department

If you are planning on doing bulk cleanups, let your users know

It is almost always a good idea to start with a bulk clean up session where you unshare all externally shared files that have not been modified for 12-18 months to get rid of legacy sharings. But before doing so, we recommend that you inform your users on the what, when, and why of that cleanup.

We also recommend that you schedule such a cleanup once or twice every year to get to the bottom of your organization's older shared files.