Anyone knowledgeable about MS Teams?

[NigelHarmansNewWife]

We use Teams at work. I have new Teams on the system when logged in and have the app on an iPhone.

I discovered a chat thread with a colleague was completely empty when I went to send them a message. I was logged in using my laptop. Seems they've set their policy to auto delete after X number of days? Made a mental note to snip conversations and save them if I ever wanted a record.

I've just found out the app on my iPhone still has all the previous chat.

Anyone knowledgeable know what's going on here? TIA

My workplace has it set to delete older messages yes.

But do you know why all the previous chat messages are still there on the phone app? This isn't a company policy btw, it appears the person has set their own

My company also does this automatically as part of their data retention policy. I don’t think the period is that long either.

Maybe you have to set the policy in the phone app as well?

Maybe - or maybe the phone downloads the messages? I’m guessing though!

I would guess its a server side policy and your local Teams app hadn't refreshed. I often see a difference between devices which eventually synchronise.

Its common practice in businesses to purge messages and emails over a certain age since actual decisions should be recorded on decision logs/minutes or other permanent record.

If you want to keep a record of a specific comment for eg behaviour issues then you need to screenshot it but keep the full context not just the comment or its value is limited.

It's one user who looks to have set their own policy. It's not a general policy.

I think it's fairly standard for companies to limit the retention period for things like ms teams. If you want to record something longer term then using email is probably best

What does the deletion message say?

Server side policies can be set to delete some messages and not others and are often rolled out by groups of users which can create an inconsistent appearance from the user end.

Generally it's an organisation setting. It is possible delete an individual chat thread (depending on policy setting) but that is a one off manual activity AFAIK. The person may have wanted to clear up their chat list ?
It is possible to set custom policies and I think these can be applied to different groups. So you may be in a different group policy than this user.

@C8H10N4O2 I'm not aware of any change of company policy. There is no deletion message, just none of the previous chat from either of us is there. It is only one user who seems to have set their own retention policy.

Interesting @Keepthosenamesgoing

If the message in the chat says " we've deleted older messages due to your organisation retention policy" or something to that effect, then it's a group policy thing. If it doesn't say that then it is likely a manual deletion.
The other thing to note that the clean up routine works alphabetically iirc so that means that if it was stopped part way through it will have deleted some users but not all. I've seen that in the past where the group policy changed and then different policies ended up affecting different users differently depending on where they were in the alphabet!

To reiterate: there is no deletion message.

It is only the chat with this one colleague which has gone and it's still there on the phone app.

It may well be manual deletion - I don't know.

That's loads of info on how to do this, so yes, they may have done that

support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/hide-chats-and-delete-messages-10e105ed-0c22-4d94-b7b6-d543a27c472b#:~:text=Go%20to%20Chat%20on%20the,.)%20and%20pick%20Delete%20chat.

Good to know - in which case there's probably a setting they haven't used that could delete the chat on all devices or the function is device-specific?

Update: possible glitch in the matrix as everything from the previous chat is back!