Microsoft Adjusts Switchover Plan for Teams Meeting Recordings

Move from Stream Classic to OneDrive in July

In a revision of their plan to move recordings of Teams meetings off Stream Classic to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online (collectively, “OneDrive” or ODSP for OneDrive and SharePoint), Microsoft updated message center notification MC222640 on February 16 to announce a new timeline. The revised dates are:

• 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).
• July 7, 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 big change here is that Microsoft has rolled back on their plan to force commercial and GCC tenants to move to OneDrive storage on March 1. Customer pushback because of the looming March 1 date likely “encouraged” Microsoft to make the change. The new plan aligns commercial and GCC tenants with education tenants, which had previously been granted an extension to July to accommodate the end of the school year.

Microsoft also clarified that the switchover in July will be incremental. Microsoft says that customers should move themselves before July by updating Teams meeting policies to choose OneDrive over Stream to take advantage of new features such as the ability to share recordings with external people (not supported in Stream) and the larger storage quota available in OneDrive for Business. Most recordings of Teams meetings are for 1:1 calls or personal meetings, so they end up in OneDrive for Business rather than SharePoint Online, which is used to store recordings of channel meetings.

The sharing list 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 – the organizer or any participant assigned the presenter role can start the recording) must update the sharing list to include that user (Figure 1). Channel recordings stored in SharePoint can be accessed by any team member.

Big Win for Go Local

Because OneDrive is a base workload that’s available in all regions, a bigger win for customers in Office 365 “Go Local” datacenter regions like France, South Africa, and Norway is that they can store meeting recordings in-region rather than in the closest geo-region (like EMEA).

Some Features to Follow

Switching to OneDrive is easy, but the downside is that some features do not follow the switchover. Microsoft says that they will implement additional language support for transcription, transcript edits, transcript search, automatic captions, variable playback control and other features “later in 2021.” It’s expected that these features will include indexing and eDiscovery of video content and transcripts.