How to Manage Microsoft Teams Meeting Recording Auto-Expiration

As part of the evolution of the new Stream (built on SharePoint) and due to overwhelming customer requests, we are introducing the meeting recording auto-expiration feature, which will automatically delete Microsoft Teams recording files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint after a preset period of time. Admins can disable this feature if desired.

Please find related documentation here:

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.

If you do not want new meeting recordings in your tenant to automatically expire, simply follow the Teams admin center or PowerShell instructions below to disable the feature. The functionality to physically delete the files will be enabled starting the third week of Jan 2022.

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.

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 off “Meetings automatically expire” 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 and admin controls here.

Learn more about user-controls for the feature here.