MC274188: Teams Meeting Recordings Auto-Expiration stored in OneDrive and SharePoint

Updated May 24, 2022: We have updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

Updated April 29, 2022: We have begun rolling this out and will be monitoring customer reported issues to ensure a smooth deployment.

Updated April 06, 2022: We have begun rolling this out and will be monitoring customer reported issues to ensure a smooth deployment.

Updated April 01, 2022: We have begun rolling this out and will be monitoring customer reported issues to ensure a smooth deployment.

Updated November 09, 2021: We have updated this post with guidance on how to take preemptive action. We are not turning on the auto-expiration feature yet. New action is required if you do not want your meeting recordings to auto-expire in January 2022.

Updated August 31, 2021: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Additionally, they have updated this post to correct the setting modification capability limitations and will provide an additional update when those limitations are corrected.

As part of the evolution of the new Stream (built on SharePoint), we are 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. This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 84580.

Newly created Teams meeting recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint will be automatically deleted by the service based on a default Teams policy setting. Teams Admins will be able to modify the default meeting recording expiration time via a setting in the Teams Admin Portal or by modifying policy attributes using Powershell scripts. Newly created meeting recordings in OneDrive & SharePoint will be automatically deleted after this point unless the meeting owner extends the expiration. Meeting owners will be notified about expired recordings and may extend the expiration date in OneDrive/SharePoint. Compliance policies will override the expiration setting.

Do not want recordings in your tenant to auto-expire? No problem, instructions to disable the feature in the Teams admin console or in PowerShell are shown below. We will not turn on the auto-expiration actions until January 2022 at the earliest, to give you time to override the policy if you’d like.

Note: The policy attribute to control the expiration is NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays. If you want to override the default and have not yet set this new attribute, please do so.

To ensure the best experience we have 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, we are updating the default expiration days from 60 to 120 days. We are 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, we are deleting files, and we want to ensure we spend adequate time in our testing and early adopter environments. We have 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? We rolled out the ability for the tenant admin to define the default expiration days to allow them to preemptively define the default behavior before we roll out the actual expiration stamping and execution.
3. How will I know when this feature is fully rolled out to my tenant? We will provide another update to the message center post when we are 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.
4. As part of the evolution of the new Stream (built on SharePoint), we are 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

• Timing: Timing: late March (previously early January) through early June (previously mid-May)
• Roll-out: tenant level
• Control type: user control and admin control
• Action: review, assess and decide what you want the default expiration period to be for your organization
• FAQs: Auto-expiration of Teams meeting recordings

Note: The cmd to preemptively change the MeetingExpirationDays setting in Teams is not available yet. Microsoft will update this message center post when modification of the setting is available, before the expiration feature is enabled.

How this will affect your organization

New recordings will automatically expire 60 days after they are recorded if no action is taken, except for A1 users who will receive a max 30-day default setting. The 60-day default was chosen because, on average across all tenants, 99%+ of meeting recordings are never watched again after 60 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.

What you need to do to prepare

To change the default auto-expiration setting for your tenant, go to admin.teams.microsoft.com, navigate to Meetings > Meeting Policies > Add in the left navigation panel. Then modify the setting under the Recording & transcription section. You can turn “Meetings automatically expire” to off if you do not want meeting recordings to expire at all, or you can set a specific number of default days between 1 and 99999.

Or modify the setting in PowerShell by setting the attribute NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays. If you use PowerShell, set the attribute to “-1” to never auto-expire TMRs, or set it to a specific number of days (min: 1 day, max: 99,999 days). PowerShell documentation here: Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy (SkypeForBusiness) | Microsoft Docs

Example PowerShell Cmd:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays 30

If you are going to specify a tenant level expiration standard, inform your user base about the change before we deploy it so that they are aware they will need to take action to retain their new recording files past the specified time period once the feature is enabled. They will also be notified in various ways as described in the FAQs link below.

Learn more

• About the feature in these FAQs: Auto-expiration of Teams meeting recordings
• Meeting policies and meeting expiration in Microsoft Teams
• Record a meeting in Teams

Message ID: MC274188
Published: 30 July 2021
Updated: 24 May 2021
Action required by: 25 March 2022