How Teams Stores Meeting Recordings in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online

Teams Meeting Recordings Moving from Stream Classic to ODSP

Updated: June 9, 2021

Announced at Ignite 2020, the move for Teams video recordings to use OneDrive storage is now in place (the move is really to store Teams meeting recordings in both OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, or ODSP for short). Tenants have been able to opt-in to use OneDrive to store recordings of Teams meetings since mid-October 2020.

The timeline for the roll-out has gone through several revisions but is currently:

• October 19, 2020: Tenants can opt to use OneDrive to store new recordings of Teams meetings. (Complete).
• January 7, 2021: All new recordings of Teams meetings are stored in OneDrive unless the organization explicitly choses to continue using Stream by updating their meeting policies. (Complete).
• August 16, 2021: An incremental roll-out begins to switch tenants to store new recordings of Teams meetings to OneDrive even if their meeting policies are set to use Stream.

The most recent change removed the March 1, 2021 deadline for commercial and GCC tenants to move to OneDrive. Microsoft is also now saying that the roll-out in July to switch all tenants over to OneDrive will be incremental rather than a hard date. Commercial and GCC tenants now share a common date with education tenants, to which Microsoft had previously extended support until July to accommodate the school year.

Updating Teams Meeting Policies

Control over the choice of storage location is accomplished by updating Teams meeting policies to switch the RecordingStorageMode setting from Stream (the default) to OneDriveForBusiness. This currently can’t be done through the Teams admin center, but it’s an easy update to do in PowerShell using the latest Teams PowerShell module. This module contains the old Skype for Business Online cmdlets needed to update policies. With the module installed we can do the following ($O365Cred is a variable populated using the Get-Credential cmdlet). In this example, we update a single meeting policy to instruct Teams to store the recordings started by the users assigned the policy in OneDrive for Business.

# Connect to Teams and update the meeting policy
Connect-MicrosoftTeams -Credential $O365Cred
# Update the Teams meeting policy for US employees so that their meeting recordings are stored in OneDrive
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "U.S. Region Workers" -RecordingStorageMode OneDriveForBusiness

Update May 13, 2021: The latest version of the Teams PowerShell module is 2.3.1.

OneDrive Means SharePoint as Well

Saying that the storage is OneDrive for Business is a little misleading, but it might be explained because recordings for personal and group chats as well as meetings organized by a person and not tied to a channel end up in OneDrive. Channel meetings end up in the document library SharePoint team site for the team. In both cases, a folder called Recordings is used.

When the switch is effective, users see that recordings are being saved to OneDrive rather than Stream (Figure 1).

One thing I noticed is that those who record meetings do not receive email to tell them that their recording is ready to view. This might be linked with the lack of post-processing currently done when videos are stored in OneDrive for Business.

In this instance, the meeting is in a channel, so the recording is saved in SharePoint. We can see the MP4 file for the recording through the Teams Files channel tab, or by opening SharePoint. Figure 2 shows three recording files stored in the Recordings folder for a channel. Because SharePoint treats recordings like any other file, you can amend their properties, assign retention labels (but not yet sensitivity labels), and share them with other users, including people outside the tenant (subject to the restriction capability for the site).

Permissions for meeting recordings stored in OneDrive are limited to internal users, even if guests participate in the call. If it is necessary to share a recording with an external user, the owner (the person who started the recording) must update the sharing list to include that user. Channel recordings stored in SharePoint can be accessed by any team member.

Teams Meeting Recordings and Storage

Only new recordings are stored for now, but Microsoft says they will deliver facilities to move old recordings over from Stream to OneDrive. When this happens, the storage currently charged against the Stream storage quota for the tenant will be absorbed by OneDrive and SharePoint quotas. You might then have to pay more attention to reporting the amount of storage consumed in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.

Ups and Downs, but Mostly Up

Being able to share meeting recordings outside the tenant is a major change over the capabilities available in classic Stream that will be welcomed by many. Some downsides do exist. For instance, the automatic transcript and captions created by Stream and features like video trim and noise suppression aren’t yet available for videos stored in OneDrive. Microsoft is working to close any functionality gaps and are confident that everything will be in place to allow a complete switchover from classic Stream as scheduled.

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The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook will cover the transition of video content from classic Stream to Stream 2.0 as it unfolds. Being able to change to reflect the actual state of Office 365 is a big advantage of an eBook.