Forum Discussion
Is EXO mandatory for Teams retention policy to work
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 .
VigneshGanesan There are not two copies. Period. There is one copy of Teams data in Azure CosmosDB.
The compliance records in EXO created by the substrate are mail items. They are imperfect copies of what exists in Teams (no likes or other reactions - see https://office365itpros.com/2019/02/01/teams-compliance-records-focused-on-by-new-report/ for details of a report done on Teams compliance). You should lose the idea that two copies exist.
The problem you face is that Teams builds on many Office 365 components to avoid developing its own functionality. eDiscovery depends on content indexes, which are generated not from Teams but from the contents of the EXO mailboxes. Retention is also based on the contents of EXO mailboxes because it is the Exchange Managed Folder Assistant that processes Teams retention policies against the items stored in the mailboxes. Ergo, you need EXO provisioned to have Teams compliance.
TonyRedmond ....Thanks for clarifying