Microsoft 365 Information Governance – Retention policies for Teams private channels messages

Until now, retention policies for Teams channel messages have excluded any private channel messages. With this new feature you will be able to apply retention policies to user messages shared within Teams private channels.

Retention policies scoped to private channel messages will require a separate policy from your Teams channels or chat policies.

Private channel messages are indexed into the participating users’ mailboxes for Compliance purposes, for this reason, private channel policies will be scoped on a per-user basis rather than per-Team basis. You will be able to select all users in the tenant and therefore cover all private channels or a sub-set of users and apply the policy only to the private channel messages they are participants of.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 70582.

When this will happen:

We expect the rollout of the public preview of this feature to begin in late June 2021 and complete by late July 2021.

How this will affect your organization:

Administrators will now be able to create Teams private channel messages retention policies from the Information Governance solution in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center.

Retention policies for Teams private channel messages do not apply to Teams channel messages or Teams chat messages.

What you need to do to prepare:

No action is needed to receive this feature; as soon as it’s rolled out to your tenant, a new location for “Teams private channels” will become visible and selectable when creating a new retention policy. To begin retaining content in Teams private channels, create a new retention policy which leverages this location.

You may also want to update any training materials and communicate this change to your users or team responsible for Information Governance at your organization.

Learn more:

To learn more about retention for Teams, please visit our documentation: Learn about retention for Teams – Microsoft 365 Compliance | Microsoft Docs