Organization Chat Logs? And, local document control? For Administrators.

[SabatinoY]

The company I work for is considering switching to MS Teams and I have been tasked with researching it's functionality compared to our current solutions.  Teams could potentially replace our chat client, Teamwork.com (our project management solution), and provide solutions to scheduling and collaboration.

I hope it's ok to ask two questions in one post.  If not, I'll be happy to delete this thread and start 2 new ones.

1. If we deploy MS teams to 50-100 users, is there a way for our MS Admin to store all chat logs for all employees/users?  The reason we use our current chat client internally is because it allows us to save all the company chat logs to a single location.  These chat logs are searchable by date of chat, user, and keywords.
2. If we want to sync MS teams with local files, on a shared drive on a server, or on a user's PC, is that possible?  If so, how would it manage file saving, locations, and versions (in the case where multiple users might be working on the same document for example)?  At the last company I worked for we used teams for file collaboration, but all those files were online IIRC, whereas at this company everything is stored initially on local drives, which are backed up with 3x redundancy locally and in the cloud every night.

These are the 2 primary questions which I couldn't find a lot of information online about.  Any input is appreciated.

Sincerely,

[#2 · Accepted solution]

1. You can use compliance module in Microsoft 365 that allows you to search mailboxes, which is where chat messages from Teams gets stored. You can specify date ranges, keywords etc. And export or view the results.

2. Teams cannot use local file shares. It utilizes connected SharePoint sites / document libraries to store the files tab files by default. You can link to some other cloud file providers but not to local files. You would have to find some form of File Sync solution that would sit on your file server and sync the files between local and the SharePoint library for the Team(s) you wish to sync files with.

If you migrate files to Teams, then users of the Teams can use OneDrive sync client to sync the files from the Team to their local pc for offline access etc. Files in Teams open online by default and support co-authoring, so users can edit the same files at the same times if they are supported office document types. If the users are offline then the changes will sync later and prompt for any conflicts. SharePoint includes Check-in/Check-out features should you go that route as well.