Forum Discussion
Is EXO mandatory for Teams retention policy to work
AFAIK , 1:1 chat as well as the group chat gets stored in the Office 365 substrate ( i.e . a hidden mailbox )
This is incorrect. Teams data stays in Azure. What's in Exchange are compliance records - copies of Teams chats and messages created by the substrate. These items are in user mailboxes (for personal chats and private channel conversations) and group mailboxes (for public channel conversations).
If you want compliance, I think you'll need to have Exchange Online turned on for users.
TonyRedmond VigneshGanesan Hi guys, I just waited for Tony to reply as it was an interesting scenario that I never heard of. Usually we just convert a mailbox to a shared mailbox and remove the license/put it on hold. But this was a different request and my guess was that a license is required.
I want to share this table as it describes where Teams data is stored depending on content type.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/location-of-data-in-teams#location-of-teams-data-at-rest I assume you already know this (but others do read the posts). Cheers!
ChristianBergstrom Unfortunately some of the language used in that post could be improved. Specifically, sentences like:
"The data is also stored in a hidden folder in the user and group mailboxes to enable Information Protection features."
This creates the impression that Teams data is written into two places. It isn't. The Teams data is in Azure CosmosDB. (Incomplete) copies of messages are captured by the substrate and written into mailboxes. https://www.petri.com/office-365-conversation-records-ediscovery
TonyRedmond ChristianBergstrom .....Microsoft's documentation states that the chat gets stored in Azure cosmos DB and then gets ingested to Exchange to enable compliance . This makes it looks like there are two copies . Coming to the retention policy piece , it looks like EXO is mandatory for applying the Teams retention policy because when your want to perform an eDiscovery search it gives you an error stating that the user's mailbox is not provisioned . My worry is , what if i don't want to perform an eDiscovery search and I just want to apply a 1 day retention policy ? Is EXO still mandatory ? That's not clear to me yet .
