NYES Digital Support

In late September 2021, Microsoft will introduce a new auto-expiration feature for Teams meeting recordings stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. For Education establishments, which most commonly just use the Office 365 A1 licence, recordings will be moved to the recycle bin 30 days after creation. For other licence types, such as A3, A5 or commercial licences, the expiration period will be 60 days. Tenant admins can control the default expiration period using Teams meeting policies. Users can override expiration for individual files, but unfortunately not for A1 users. To retain recordings for longer than 30 days A1 users will need to download the file to a non-synced folder. At either the tenant or user level (excluding A1 users as noted above), the expiration timeline can range from one day to several years, or even set to never auto-expire.

When a recording is deleted due to the expiration setting, the end user will be notified via email. The SharePoint tenant or site admin, or the end user with edit/delete permissions will be able to retrieve the file from the recycle bin for up to 90 days.

Further information about this feature can be found by referring to the following Microsoft article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoftteams/cloud-recording#auto-expiration

Additional clarifications:

• The expiration setting is not a retention setting. For example, setting a 30-day expiration on a file will trigger an auto-deletion 30 days after the file was created, but it will not prevent a different system or user from deleting that file ahead of that schedule.
• When a recording is deleted due to the expiration setting, the end user will be notified via email. The SharePoint tenant or site admin, or the end user with edit/delete permissions will be able to retrieve the file from the recycle bin for up to 90 days.
• Any retention/deletion/legal hold policies you have designated in the Compliance center will override this feature. In other words, if there is a conflict between your designated Compliance policy setting and the expiration setting, the compliance policy timeline always wins.
• The admin does not have the ability to override end-user modification capabilities.

Modification of the default value is not yet possible, but Microsoft will provide instructions on how to modify the setting in PowerShell or the Teams Admin Center once it becomes available. Microsoft state that you will be able to modify the setting before the feature goes live.