Attendance Report Retention Policy Already in Force

Microsoft decision (announced in message center notification MC1022529 on March 4, 2025) to implement a retention policy for meeting attendance reports is interesting on multiple levels. The title of the notification is misleading because this is a new rather than an updated retention policy.

The attendance report retention policy is in force now and means that “all meeting attendance reports will be stored for one year after meeting end date to align with the Microsoft privacy policy.” I don’t see any specific mention of meeting attendance reports in Microsoft’s privacy policy, but I’m sure it’s covered somewhere. At least, it is to the satisfaction of Microsoft’s lawyers.

The term “retention policy” can confuse because it usually refers to the policies managed by Microsoft Purview data lifecycle management, aka Microsoft 365 retention policies. Teams chats and channel conversations can be managed by Microsoft 365 retention policies, but in this case, the retention policies are specific to Teams, just like the retention applied to Teams meeting recordings.

Attendance Report Basics

Attendance reports are available to meeting organizers. They can also be accessed programmatically using Graph APIs. In the case of meeting recordings, Microsoft research discovered that very few recordings were viewed more than 60 days after an event. It seems likely that exactly the same case pertains for attendance reports.

I doubt that many organizers go back and check the attendance for long-finished meetings. Certainly, organizers possibly review the attendance report for some meetings, but I don’t think this is common practice. Those who do can see details like the time meeting attendees joined and left the meeting, and if they reacted during the event (Figure 1).

Clicking on an attendee reveals details of that person’s “engagement” with the meetings (Figure 2). Some are less effusive during calls and dislike using reactions to express their view on proceedings. Others are more demonstrative. It’s all very much a personal choice, as is enabling cameras during calls.

Downloading Attendance Report Data

The download option for attendance reports preserves the attendance report data in a CSV file. If you want to preserve information about meetings held before November 1, 2024, you have until late August 2025 to download that data. That’s curious, because a one-year retention policy implies that these reports should be available for a full year. For instance, the attendance reports for meetings held in October 2024 should be available until October 2025, and so on. Tenants can’t change the retention period, alter the retention period, or influence when retention jobs run to remove attendance reports.

My assumption is that Microsoft began stamping attendance reports with retention dates on or around November 1, 2024, and took the decision to run a one-time clean-up of older attendance reports on some unspecified date in late August 2025. Attendance reports have been around for several years. Microsoft discarded the old format in February 2021 and have been tweaking the current format ever since. The one-time cleanup operation will set a baseline for ongoing retention in the future.

No Option to Avoid

Microsoft 365 tenant can’t avoid the new attendance report retention policy. The justification for the new policy is Microsoft’s privacy policy and it’s probably a justifiable course of action considering the probability that people will want to go back and view old attendance data years after an event. Besides, organizers can preserve attendance data if they need to, so there’s not much to complain about.

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