Forum Discussion
Preservation
Where did you copy that from? IMHO it's not very clear and even misleading. Yes, no items will be removed automatically if there is no retention policy in place. And yes, it's actually hard to delete stuff as the TeamChats folder is not exposed in clients. But if the user knows what he's doing, he can certainly delete messages from the folder. So if you need to ensure chat data is kept immutably for some duration, you need the policy.
TonyRedmond just in case.
VasilMichev Thanks, got it from here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/retention-policies and in the FAQ section.
I left feedback on that article to make it a bit more clear btw.
"Teams data is archived..." Well, copies of Teams messages sent to channel conversations and chats are stored in Exchange Online mailboxes for eDiscovery/compliance purposes. I wouldn't say archived because that implies they could be retrieved and brought back as live messages. They're copies and not the real thing. But Teams will keep them forever if no one goes near the compliance records. If you want to have control over retention and removal, you use retention policies. Simple. https://www.petri.com/teams-compliance-records-hybrid-exchange
TonyRedmond Thanks. What do you mean by if .....no one goes near the compliance records?
Example scenario, we want Teams messages to be kept for discovery purposes. Since by default conversations are retained forever in absence of retention, we don't need to 'enable' preservation policy.
That means...
-Messages a user deletes from their teams conversations are available in content/eDiscovery searches
-If the O365 group is deleted, the teams conversations are deleted 30 days post group deletion, at which time they wouldn't be available in discovery?
However, if we set a retention to preserve content xx years in the Security & Compliance center, the content would be retained if Group is deleted? Maybe that's the reason to actually set the retention policy to preserve, for the scenario where the Group is deleted?
escupham Despite the fact that the Teams Chat folder is hidden from clients like OWA and Outlook, retention records can be removed by users if they use tools like MFCMAPI. To stop this, you apply a retention policy for Teams. When a policy is in place, any attempt to remove an item will appear to succeed but behind the scenes Exchange will take a copy and keep it in the Recoverable Items\Purges folder.
You don't need a preservation policy. You need a retention policy to keep the items for whatever period your organization dictates. Teams uses special retention policies because those policies only apply to Teams; other Office 365 retention policies apply the same settings to Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, etc.
