MC274188 – Updated November 09, 2021: Microsoft has updated this post with guidance on how to take preemptive action. Microsoft is 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.
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.
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. Microsoft 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.
Key points
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:
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 Microsoft deploys 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: Meeting policies and meeting expiration in Microsoft Teams.