Microsoft releases new feature to delete the recordings of meetings

Microsoft has released a new tool for Teams that allows them to destroy recording files saved in OneDrive or SharePoint after a certain amount of time has passed.

According to ZDNet, Microsoft announced the new capability in its December upgrades for the Teams collaboration platform, which also featured end-to-end encryption for calls and solutions for a Teams and Android bug that led some devices to stop after making an emergency call.

The auto-expiration feature, which is enabled by default, can be turned off by administrators. If no action is done following the rollout, all new recordings will automatically expire 60 days after they were recorded.

Microsoft expedited the feature's roll out "due to overwhelming customer requests," Microsoft said in a blogpost.

"All newly created Teams meeting recordings (TMRs) will have a default expiration of 60 days. This is on by default for all tenants," the company explained in a support document.

"This means that by default, all TMRs created after this feature was turned on will be deleted 60 days after their creation date," it added.

Admins can also set meetings to never expire using PowerShell commands or the Teams admin centre.

The feature is defined by Microsoft as a "lightweight housekeeping approach to reduce storage clutter" caused by old recordings, which require roughly 400 MB of cloud storage per hour of recording on average.