Forum Discussion
Concerns about Chat History
Daniel Smith If you don't have any active retention policies private chat messages will be kept in the user mailbox until the user deletes it. You can setup retention policies that deletes private chat messages after 30 days (fewer days will be supported in the future).
Yes, we understand that the best we can do is to delete history after 30 days. The ability to delete after 24 hours is coming, but not ready for prime time.
Unfortunately, in our industry, if data is captured (at all) then it must go under a long-term retention standard. Under Skype for Business, we had the option to not capture any data, period. The current architecture of Teams has introduced a mess of legal consequences due to this change.
Many of the proposals suggest providing an option to have the storage of all chat history cached on the user's local device rather than automatic storage in the cloud. Policies can then be applied to determine how long each cache is retained (if at all).
Microsoft really needs to address this issue with Teams.
Daniel Smith Actually it will not be after 24 hours, it will take a few days before the data is completely removed.
You have the option to turn off private chats or as you say you can implement long-term retention.
If Microsoft see this as a big issue for on-boarding customers to Teams they will address this. I'm not sure that the uservoice you posted is addressing the issue you have.
Storing the data in the cloud is the only way for companies with strict compliance restriction to have control over the data, if it was stored locally on client computers only that would not be possible. It would also be hard to solve synchronisation between different clients so that users always can reach their data.