Forum Discussion
Teams Meeting Recordings and Transcriptions - Retention Concerns
I don't use the feature really, been a long time since at least. But it's not a very straightforward process as far as I remember. The transcript is stored in the meeting organizer's EXO account and can be accessed through the meeting chat and Recording & Transcripts tab in Teams until a meeting organizer deletes the transcript. Normally people add the transcript to the recording in OneDrive For Business, meaning the copy. That can be deleted but the original is still in EXO and isn't easily deleted for an end-user if going for that hidden folder but should be deleted by the organizer the "normal way" obviously.
Basically a compliance issue as of today as you cannot use retention deletion for the transcript and have to depend on organizers deletion (or account deletion). As far as I know this prevents some orgs. from using the feature and instead only use Live Captions in meetings as no data is being stored anywhere.
ChristianJBergstrom Understood. Good point that the meeting organizer is the only one that can delete the transcript, but unfortunately there is no way to prevent it being downloaded by another participant (before it's deleted).
Even after deletion, it's stil retained in their Exchange mailbox and is therefore available in eDiscovery searches. I've been told that we only back up the journal, which is only sent and received emails, so we're trying to find out if meeting transcriptions are journaled or not. Even if they aren't, they'd still live in the user's mailbox, potentially for years.
We were looking for a way to lock down the ability to transcribe and record to only certain individuals and then have those recordings and transcriptions auto-delete after a week or two. In effect, they would just be available to aid in the taking of official meeting notes or for someone to re-watch a portion of the meeting.
As you've said, it seems like we'd need to rely on a fair amount of manual effort and training to achieve this. It's unfortunate the Microsoft hasn't built more controls into the policies for these features 😞.
- It will come, I'm sure. "The initial release of Meeting Transcription will not have support for applying retention policies, eDiscovery, or legal hold. As a result, the lifecycle of meeting transcripts will depend on manual management by the meeting organizers."
I asked the PG for a possible ETA for retention policies and will update if/when I get an answer.Has there been any movement on this regarding being able to add retention policies on Teams meeting transcription files? From what I can find I would say no, but wanted to check.
I've also been thinking is there anything we can do with PowerShell/Graph API here? Could we maybe script it out and have a script or do this programmatically to say if the file in the transcript Exchange hidden folder (whatever folder this is called) is x amount days old just delete it? I've been trying to use MFCMAPI to search my online inbox and can't see where this folder would be though? I can see a substrate files folder with sub folders but they seem to be empty. Any ideas anyone?
ChristianJBergstrom You got any update when retention of Transcription will be available.
- Great - thank you!
