SOLVED

Changes to Teams meeting recordings for EDU A1 & “Recording failed to upload to Stream” error

Microsoft

 

Hello everyone - I wanted to post a note about a change for Microsoft 365 Education A1 customers which went into effect this week.  This message was posted on the M365 Admin Message Center back on 21-July-2020 as MC218976 (pasted at the bottom of this post), but I wanted to make sure everyone was aware of the change.

In summary, Teams meeting recordings initiated by an A1 licensee will no longer automatically upload to Microsoft Stream. Note that A1 customers can still record Teams meetings, meeting attendees can download and watch the recording, and the recording can be uploaded to Stream, Teams, SharePoint, or OneDrive (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/portal-upload-teams-meeting-recording).  

Additionally, as this is rolling out, some customers have reported seeing “Recording failed to upload to Stream” errors, while others are not.  Our apologies for this misleading error message. When this A1 change went live, an update to the message logic and text shown was being rolled out, but it has not reached all M365 users yet. This will be resolved in the upcoming days when the update reaches all customers.

If you have any other questions or comments, please post them below.

 

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For customers with EDU A1 and A1 Plus licenses, Teams meeting recordings will no longer automatically upload to Microsoft Stream effective August 20, 2020. 

Key points

  • Timing: August 20, 2020
  • Roll-out: tenant level
  • Control type: user control
  • Action: review and assess

 

How this will affect your organization

This change is expected to last through the end of 2020, and Microsoft will provide updates for further changes. Meetings recorded before August 15 are not affected by this change.

 

Following this change, your end users will continue to be able to record Teams meetings.

  • To playback the meeting recording, participants will need to download the file from the chat window.
  • To share or archive a recording, meeting participants will need to download the file and then upload it to Teams, Stream, SharePoint, or OneDrive.

 

Meeting recordings will be available in the meeting chat for a period of 21 days after the meeting. After 21 days, the meeting recordings will no longer be available for download from the chat.

The download dialog includes the expiration date.

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What you need to do to prepare

Review the change and consider how to advise your end users of the change. Learn how to upload a video to Stream.

 

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55 Replies

@descapa_msft 

 

Hi there, thanks for the reminder. Is there any workaround? This auto-upload feature is very useful, especially for use in education. Every lesson is automatically recorded and available. Students can simply scroll back to the past and watch the lesson again for revision. This 21 days expiration is a disappointment. If we have to download each video and upload it somewhere to share, then it is no difference from Zoom. 

I really hope MS reinstate this killer feature that no one else has. 

Can I use Power Automate to make it look like nothing has changed? 

 

Thanks!

Gary

What if you record a call (not scheduled mtg) and there’s no chat?? Where does the recording go?

@descapa_msft Hi Daniel, as organizations with these licenses are still eligible for uploading/editing in Stream https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/license-overview how come the automatic upload is deprecated? Just curious. Thanks.

Google Meet and Adobe Connect have had the auto-recording feature since a long time ago. Our school is going through the auto-recording to Stream issue, which has frustrated several of our users.

@descapa_msft This really seems counter intuitive and a step back. DL a video from the cloud then re-upload to the cloud (Streams). Why not leave as is and make meeting recordings disappear after 21 days in Streams.

 

I really hope you reverse this decision, auto upload feature is one of the major features that made us as school use Microsoft teams instead of ZOOM.

 

 

This change is really really bad with grave consequences:

 

- the change was communicated barely a month ago, during summer holidays, leaving no time to mitigate the impact

- every education institution is scrambling right now to get ready for a new academic year with lots of uncertainty and massive change already due to Corona policies

- such a budget (10k employees needing A3 instead A1+) wasn't budgeted and can't be approved/freed up on such a short notice

- user are seeing inaccurate error messages

- we loose existing features, and these changes are perceived as "disabling an automatic process and replacing it with manuel cumbersome procedures"

- internal pressure within eductional institutions is very high for competing tools like Zoom, which is for most users easier to use, Panopto, with specific educational features ... 

 

An example of the impact: Oral exams are being recorded these weeks with Teams. After the recoding was available in Stream the teacher changes the permission to exclude the student from reviewing. Right now teachers notice they can't change permissions anymore to exclude a student from viewing the recording, this freaks them out. When it was made in a 1:1 chat, it's not possible to remove the student from the chat. Some creative teachers are now inviting colleagues pro forma so they can remove the student from the chat, but they and we lost all trust in this technology. We can only hope the student is unable to review the recording but are unable to control or check it properly.

 

I'm sorry to be really pissed at this rushed decision, we are working hard to support our users getting the most out of Office 365 tools, explaining why they provide more value, provide consistency or more security (even though they always find an alternative tool that is easier to use for a certain use case).

 

I hope you will revert the change but honestly, I'm not sure if it isn't already too late. 

 

Bart

@garyang The workaround is that for the customers who need to record ensure that they are on any other license than A1.  They could be on A3, A5, E3, etc.  Like we said in the post this is a temporary change so expect more updates in the upcoming months, and in the meantime please transition to another license.  

If you need anything else please let me know.

@TechyMiller I am not sure I understand, this post didn't change anything to do with what you mentioned.  If you have Stream enabled, and recording enabled in Teams, and the user isn't A1 the recording will go to Stream, otherwise the recording stays within Teams for 21 days.  

@ChristianBergstrom Here's what I posted about this on the Stream tech community:

 

This is a change on Stream to ensure everything is running smoothly for our customers.  This change isn't about any permanent changes to A1 or retirement of that license, but a temporary change while Stream is working on infrastructure improvements.

 

As I mentioned in the other post A1 users can still record meetings and attendees can play back the recordings, so for the training scenario that should still work.  Of course there are many features in Stream like channels that wouldn't work so individuals would need to manually upload, though this help doc might help: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/portal-upload-teams-meeting-recording 

If it is a training material you could have people use the Stream screen recorder and have it automatically record and it goes to Stream: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/portal-create-screen-recording

 

Additionally if you have some customers who need to have Teams meeting recordings auto-saved to Stream you can move those individuals over to the A3 license as this change was only for A1 licensees.

 

@EmileRec if you move to another license, such as A3 this will be available, would it be possible for the organisation to move users who need to record to this license? 

@Daniel Escapa To be completely honest with you and I know its not your problem or concern, but we are a school in lebanon (hyperinflation, economic collapse, beirut disaster..) . With all whats going on, guess i will just manage it on A1.

Thank you for your time.

@descapa_msft my guess is we ARE A1 users and what I was asking is if you record a call...not a scheduled Team Meeting...and there is no chat used during the call, where is the link to download the Stream recording and save it because it didn't automatically go to Stream like it should because it is no longer an available feature for A1 users (which is ridiculous).  

@descapa_msft Hi, Daniel, I'm sorry, but what is not being addressed here is the loss of privacy and control over recordings this change entails. It is completely understandable that the servers are overdrawn by the demand, but what is not acceptable is that no workaround to maintain the control over recordings has been added before rolling out this change (like sending the recordings through e-mail or private message). This puts Microsoft Teams well behind its free competitors like G Suite or even free Zoom. While calls might be limited to 40 minutes, the host has complete control over who can see the recordings. This is not the case here. 

Changing licenses is not an answer either, because what is missing is not Stream's service (which in our University wasn't even used because of the lack of external sharing when needed [most Students don't have licenses yet]), but control over recordings. There are lot of educators, like myself, that started using this service only recently because our IT departments (on short budgets) asked what we would like to use and now, after opting for this service, the record function is completely gimped to oblivion out of the blue. If you don't understand how control over recordings is a big issue in Education, then you have no idea what you have done with this move. 

Recordings are not even deletable from chat. Something must be done about this ASAP. 

@descapa_msft 

I think we all agree on the fact that having a lot of recordings that sometimes is not reviewed is just not sustainable for you. I also think that if we need to do something extra to upload the videos to Stream it'd be ok. What I think is freaking teachers out is that they cannot control who can download the recording anymore, and that is IF they would like it to be downloadable, because most of the times they would only let students watch them.

What is the solution for this?

@mesantelli / @descapa_msft I also have concerns that this will cause issues with privacy - as videos can be downloaded onto any device by any member of the school, those videos could potentially then be spread around anywhere instead of being kept within the school.

 

Can you please confirm whether we can set it so students cannot download videos from their class Teams, and only teachers can do so to enable them being uploaded onto Stream?

 

I just cannot understand why no one thought about the safeguarding consequences of this change. Truly shocking.

This is so true @mesantelli, completely messed up the way we are doing things! 

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by descapa_msft (Microsoft)
Solution
Hi, just send the link to them. They’ll know what to do.

For the record it’s the meeting policy that needs to be updated.

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity XXX -RecordingStorageMode "OneDriveForBusiness"

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