M365 Changelog: (Updated) Teams Meeting Recordings Auto-Expiration in OneDrive and SharePoint

MC274188 – Updated April 29, 2022: Microsoft has begun rolling this out and will be monitoring customer reported issues to ensure a smooth deployment.

To ensure the best experience Microsoft has postponed the start of final stage of this change until late March. The final stage is the part of the feature that actually stamps the expiration date on the file and physically deletes the file based on that stamped expiration date. 

For any tenant that does not have a custom policy in place already, Microsoft is updating the default expiration days from 60 to 120 days. Microsoft is making this update based on new statistics that show on average across all tenants, less than 1% of recordings are watching after 120 vs 5% after 60 days.

As a reminder if you want to override the default setting you can do so in the Teams Admin center or by setting NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays in PowerShell.

1. Why are you delaying this rollout?
   • As part of this change, Microsoft is deleting files, and wants to ensure it spends adequate time in our testing and early adopter environments. Microsoft has therefore decided to delay the production rollout of the portion of this feature that stamps expiration dates on the file and deletes the file based on that expiration date.
2. How come I can set and see the expiration policy but do not see the expiration set on the files?
   • Microsoft rolled out the ability for the tenant admin to define the default expiration days to allow them to preemptively define the default behavior before it rolls out the actual expiration stamping and execution.
3. How will I know when this feature is fully rolled out to my tenant?
   • Microsoft will provide another update to the message center post when it’s actively deploying to production tenants. Users will be informed about pending expirations via a notification in the Teams chat window when the video pops into the chat at the end of the recording session (see picture below). If you want to preemptively inform your users about this feature, you can tell them they will see this message when the feature is rolled out, or you can wait for the message center update in March 2022.
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As part of the evolution of the new Stream (built on SharePoint), Microsoft is introducing the meeting recording auto-expiration feature, which will automatically delete Teams recording files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint after a preset period of time. Admins can disable this feature if desired.

Key points

• Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 84580.
• Timing: Timing: late March (previously early January) through mid-May (previously late April).
• Roll-out: tenant level
• Control type: user control and admin control
• Documentation:
  • Meeting policies and meeting expiration in Microsoft Teams
  • Record a meeting in Teams
• Action: review, assess and decide what you want the default expiration period to be for your organization

How this will affect your organization:

New recordings will automatically expire 120 days after they are recorded if no action is taken, except for A1 users who will receive a max 30-day default setting. The 120-day default was chosen because, on average across all tenants, 99%+ of meeting recordings are never watched again after 120 days. However, this setting can be modified if a different expiration timeline is desired.

Users can also modify the expiration date for any recordings on which they have edit/delete permissions, using the files details pane in OneDrive or SharePoint.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The admin does not have the ability to override end-user modification capabilities.
• This will not impact any existing meeting recordings created before the feature is deployed. Also, any changes to the default date in the admin console will only apply to newly created meeting recordings after the change is made.
• The min number of days that can be set on NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays is 1 and the maximum is 99,999 (e.g. 273 years) or it can be set to never auto-expire.
• This feature does not impact meeting recordings stored in Microsoft Stream (classic Stream) but will affect recordings stored in the new Stream (built on OneDrive and SharePoint).
• This feature is only available for Teams meeting recordings created by the Teams service in OneDrive and SharePoint. It is not available for other file types in OneDrive and SharePoint.