Policy-Based Call Recording in Microsoft Teams

Within Microsoft Teams end-users have the ability to record a call or a meeting by simply clicking on the record button. This is what Microsoft calls Convenience Recording, the ability for an end-user to instigate the recording and play-back at their convenience.

In these instances, Microsoft captures the meeting/call and retains this in the Microsoft Stream cloud for a period of 21 days during which the recording can be played back or downloaded.

This is perfectly adequate for scenarios where you are trying to capture a meeting to be played back by those who could not attend, or capturing a call so that you can play it back in order to take notes. However, if your organisation operates in a regulated industry, or has a policy to record calls for best practice, Convenience Recording is not sufficient.

Organisational Recording

Microsoft acknowledges that some organisations will need to record calls for risk management and compliance requirements and this form of recording is not something that should be instigated by the end-user, but applied at an organisational level.

As such, Microsoft provides a rich API to recording vendors such as Liquid Voice to enable us to support policy-based recording. This API allows us to support our customers to define, ‘at a company level,’ policies on which calls and meetings are required to be recorded and how long they should be retained.

Recording Policy Assignment & Provisioning

By leveraging the Microsoft APIs, we are able to allow IT administrators to determine which users and which type of interactions are to be recorded by creating and assigning compliance recording policies. Our recording bot is then automatically invited to participate in conversations when they take place based on these defined policies.

We support the creation of these policies using Microsoft Powershell which allows recording rules to be defined at the tenant, per-user, and security group level for your organisation.

Seamless Microsoft Teams Recording

When designing our solution, it was critical to ensure that it not only seamlessly integrated into the workings of Microsoft Teams, but followed the prescribed Microsoft architecture to ensure that it was robust and supportable as the Teams solution continues to evolve.

We utilise Azure-based services (bots) that leverage Microsoft’s communications platform and are registered as applications within Microsoft Graph. Our solution directly interacts with the Teams calls and meetings communications platform APIs and provides the endpoint for media ingestion.

By operating in this manner, we are able to collect key meta data associated with a call along with application-specific data and use this to comprehensively tag each recording to enable ease of future search and playback.