Microsoft Teams now supports eDiscovery for Teams users in an Exchange Hybrid environment

We are proud to announce that Microsoft Teams now supports eDiscovery, Compliance Content Search, Review and Export for Teams users in organizations that are in an exchange hybrid setup. This feature is not publicly available but supported for customers on request through Microsoft support.

How do I request for my tenant to be enabled?

You must file a request with Microsoft Support to enable your organization to search for Teams chat data in the cloud-based mailboxes for on-premises users. Include the following information when you submit the request to Microsoft Support:

• The default domain name of your Office 365 organization.
• The tenant name and tenant ID of your Office 365 organization. You can find these in the Active Directory portal (under Manage > Properties). See Find your Office 365 tenant ID.
• The following title or description of the purpose of the support request: "Enable Application Content Search for On-premises Users". This will help route the request to the Office 365 eDiscovery engineering team who will implement the request.

After the engineering change is made, Microsoft Support will send you an estimated deployment date for when this feature will be lit up in your tenant within the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center. Note that the deployment process usually takes 2-3 weeks after you submit the support request.

Why did we build this?

We have a lot of large enterprise customers in Teams who are navigating their journey from an on-premises Office environment to Office 365. These customers have users who:

• Use Teams
• Have their identities synchronized to the cloud
• Have their exchange mailboxes on premises

We want to enable the legal departments of these organizations to feel comfortable enabling private 1xN chats for their Teams users who meet the above criteria. This helps decouple the exchange cloud migration from a successful deployment of Microsoft Teams.

How this works?

If a Teams-enabled user has an on-premises Exchange mailbox and their identity has been synced to the cloud, Microsoft creates a cloud storage component for 1xN chat data. The Teams data ingestion pipeline then makes sure that Teams 1xN chat data is ingested into this cloud storage layer. Then, the data is indexed by the Information Protection system, which makes it available for use in the Security and Compliance Center through  

• eDiscovery cases (via Compliance Content Search, review and export)
• Compliance content search cmdlets in SCC
• DSRs for GDPR export 

Note: Teams channel conversations are always ingested into Group mailboxes which are always in the cloud, so that is out of scope of this document. To learn more about this, click here.  These are already supported for legal hold and covered by retention policies which was launched on March 31st, 2018. 

Where can I learn more?

Please do review this very detailed help article to understand details about:

• how to enable your organization
• how to perform eDiscovery/Content Searches for this scenario with the Security and Compliance Center (using the portal as well as cmdlets)
• how to preview and export this content

Note: The feature being referenced in this blog post supports eDiscovery Cases, Compliance Content Search, Preview and Export. However, it does not support putting a hold against such cloud storage locations nor retention policies for the Teams Chats for such users yet. We do understand that this is an important ask and are will provide more updates about our plan to address this gap soon. 

As always, please feel free to provide feedback via all available channels. We are listening…

Thanks,

Ansuman