Separate Retention Policies Coming for Teams and Copilot Compliance Records

On November 6, 2024, Microsoft issued message center notification MC926899 to inform tenants that they plan to split retention processing for compliance records created by the Microsoft 365 substrate for Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions. The current situation is that Purview Data Lifecycle management allows a single retention policy to apply to both types of compliance records. In the future, you’ll be able to have separate policies. The change is covered by Microsoft 365 roadmap item 407897.

MC926899 says that a Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required to use this feature. That statement is inaccurate insofar as administrator actions are concerned. You can configure a retention policy to process Copilot interactions without a Copilot license. The only need for a Copilot license arises when someone wants to use Copilot in apps, like Copilot in Word or Copilot in Teams.

Microsoft plans to roll out the update to public preview in mid-November 2024 with worldwide deployment in general availability following in January 2025. As always with dates for updates, some slippage can happen.

A Thoroughly Justified Change

The change is totally justified. Storing Copilot interactions alongside Teams compliance records in the hidden TeamsMessagesData folder in user mailboxes was always a short-term exercise to allow Microsoft to claim support for Purview by Microsoft 365 Copilot. Like compliance records generated for Teams messages, the records are modified versions of mail items that hold just enough information about a Copilot interaction to make the data useful for eDiscovery and compliance purposes, such as review by communication compliance policies.

But the biggest reason why this change makes sense is that organizations are likely to have radically different retention strategies for different compliance records. For instance, many organizations like to remove Teams chats after a few days (which is why Purview supports a 1-day retention period for Teams). However, throwing away Copilot interaction records after a day might not be the preferred approach. Being forced to use a single policy that enforces the same retention period to both (Figure 1) is too inflexible, and that’s why creating the ability to have a separate retention policy for Copilot is the right thing to do.

Current Retention Policies and Copilot Interactions

Microsoft hasn’t said what will happen to current retention policies that process both Teams chats and Copilot interactions. My assumption is that they will remain in place and be unaffected by the change. In other words, if you apply the same retention period to Teams and Copilot, you have nothing to do. However, if you process the two types of data together, any flaw in the retention policy settings will affect both, hopefully not to the degree experienced by KPMG in 2020.

The only work item created by the change is for organizations that want to have separate retention policies. In this scenario, administrators will need to remove Copilot interactions from the current policy and create a new policy specifically for Copilot. Unless the organization uses multiple retention policies scoped at different sets of accounts, the update should only take a few minutes.

Storage Location for Copilot Interaction Records

I don’t know yet if Microsoft plans to move the storage location. Yammer (Viva Engage) uses a separate location for its compliance records as does Planner, so it makes sense if the Copilot records move to a new folder. When it does, I’ll have to update my PowerShell script to analyze Copilot interactions and report the prompts and responses between users and apps.

The change required by the script should be straightforward. Once we know the folder where Copilot stores its interaction records, the script can use Get-ExoMailboxFolderStatistics to find the Store identifier for the folder and run some code to convert the value to a REST identifier that works with Graph API requests. At least, that’s the theory. I’ll know more when the new retention option is available in tenants.

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