[German]Another short information for administrators in corporate environments. Microsoft has changed the location for compliance records in its Team Application without much notice. As a result, PowerShell scripts that generate certain reports in this area no longer work.
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I came across this issue raised by an MVP colleague via the following tweet. It's about a change of the locations in Microsoft teams.
Microsoft has changed the location of Microsoft Team Compliance records in Exchange Online mailboxes. This makes PowerShell scripts that analyzes these records and backup products that pretend to process team data useless.
The Teams Compliance Records
The Compliance Records teams were originally introduced in April 2017. The teams' compliance records are collected from the Microsoft 365 substrate and used for the following:
- Retention processing: Retention policies work against the compliance records to allow tenants to determine how long team messages are retained.
- eDiscovery and content search: Because content records are indexed along with other mailbox data, they are searchable and discoverable when tenants need to search for information for investigation.
- Communication compliance guidelines. Compliance records are scanned by agents to detect potential violations of corporate communications policies, such as threatening or abusive behavior.
There is this article by Tony Redmond on this topic.
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Location for Teams Compliance Records changed
The Compliance Records for Teams are parts of messages that are stored (according to Tony Redmond) in the following locations:
- User mailboxes for personal and group chats and channel conversations in private channels.
- Group mailboxes for conversations in standard channels.
- Cloud-only (shard) mailboxes for messages sent by federated, hybrid and guest users.
If Microsoft has enabled compliance recording for teams, the recordings are stored in the TeamChat subfolder of the Conversation History folder. The folder name varies according to user language, but the folder type is always TeamChat, making the folder easy to find.
Tony wrote, that the choice of the location was logical at that time, as Skype for Business Online stored its conversation logs in the Conversation History folder. However, unlike the conversation history, the TeamChat folder was never accessible to users of Outlook or OWA.
What has changed is that Microsoft moved the location to a folder called TeamsMessagesData in the non-IPMRoot part of the mailboxes (IPM = Inter Person Messages, messages between people, see). This is a more logical part of the mailbox (in the eyes of Tony Redmond) where the folder will be located, as this is where the system data is stored. Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 applications store a lot of information in mailboxes that email clients cannot see.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has not announced this relocation of the storage location. As a result, PowerShell scripts that use the old locations to access the Teams Compliance Records no longer work. Tony Redmond goes into the details here and announced in this tweet a modified script for the Teams and Groups Activity Report.
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