Microsoft has changed its handling of Teams meeting recordings – what you need to know

The increase in employees working from home in recent months has – unsurprisingly – caused a measurable increase in the use of collaboration and messaging solutions. Microsoft Teams usage has seen the number of daily active users worldwide double in the span of a year. That statistic is from April, so it’s likely that number is even higher today.

Organizations that have adopted Teams have some new responsibilities that come with it. In order to preserve all the information in Teams – to meet compliance regulations, protect intellectual property, and to keep your Legal staff happy – organizations need a solid, easy-to-use solution for backup and archive of Teams data. This includes information from chats, all channels, and all users. It also includes recordings of Teams meetings.

Changes from Microsoft

Microsoft changed the way new Teams meeting recordings are stored. Before now, Microsoft was only storing Teams meeting recordings in Microsoft Stream (Classic). In the future, Microsoft now stores Teams meeting recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint instead. (As an aside, Microsoft combines OneDrive and SharePoint into a single acronym – ODSP.) They rolled out the changes to decrease dependency on Microsoft Stream and to unlock new advanced features in Teams.

New features, you say?

Yes, new features, and some pretty good ones at that. New capabilities that are a direct result of storing the recordings on OneDrive and SharePoint include:

• Enablement of both external and guest sharing
• Automatically applying retention labels on recordings for retention and deletion of meeting recordings in Teams
• Support for more features of Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo, making compliance with data sovereignty regulations simple
• Improved transcription quality and transcript content search
• Automatically sending a shared link to the meeting recording to all internal meeting attendees – links will not be sent to external attendees automatically, but the meeting organizer can share the link with them explicitly

What you need to know

Microsoft’s rollout of these changes happened in 2020. As part of their rollout process, they allowed customers to enable the Teams Meeting policy to have all recordings saved to OneDrive and SharePoint right away. As the rollout continued, customers had the option to opt out of the storage changes, but there was a deadline after which all recordings will be save to OneDrive and SharePoint rather than Stream.

The timing for the rollout for:

• As of 5 October 2020, customers could enable the Teams Meeting policy to use the new storage destinations.
• As of 31 October 2020, meeting recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint had support for English captions using the Teams transcription feature.
• In a staggered rollout between 1 and 15 November 2020, all new Teams meeting recordings were saved to OneDrive and SharePoint. Customers were able to delay this change by modifying their Teams Meeting policies and explicitly setting them to “Stream”.
• Starting in Q1 2021, no new meeting recordings can be saved to Microsoft Stream. All meeting recordings are automatically saved to OneDrive and SharePoint – even if customers have explicitly set their policies to use Stream.

What does this mean for Veritas support of backup and archive for Teams?

It makes our Teams solution even better for you. Since we also provide full support for backup and archive of the full Microsoft 365 suite – which includes OneDrive and SharePoint – our solution now includes automatic capture of meeting recording data. This means we can provide backup, recovery, and archive for Teams meeting recordings.

If you’re using Veritas NetBackup SaaS Protection for Teams backup, it’s easy to change your backup policies so that OneDrive and SharePoint backups happen automagically. This makes it simple for Veritas to provide you with even more thorough data protection.

If you’re interested in our Microsoft 365 solutions, including support for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Multi-Geo, you should check out our Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions, which can also provide data protection for your virtual machines as well as your Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications – all of which you can manage from a single unified console.

If you want to learn more about what Veritas’s Backup-as-a-Service can do to protect your data, please contact us.