Introduction to Teams policy-based recording for callings & meetings

• Applies to:

  Microsoft Teams

Policy-based recording allows orgs with Microsoft Teams for calling and meetings to decide when calls and meetings should automatically be recorded through an admin policy. Orgs can also decide when calls and meetings should be captured for subsequent processing and retention as required by relevant corporate or regulatory policy.

Teams is enhanced to support the integration of partner recording solutions. These enhancements cover platform functionality, user experiences, and administrative interfaces needed to provide an end-to-end solution for configuring, managing, recording, storing, and analyzing Teams communications. The enhancements include communications platform APIs and events for recording, which provides:

• Seamless, high-quality media capture across devices, and all supported endpoints for audio, video, screen share, and chat.

• Support for interaction capture between Teams users and supported calling endpoints (Teams, Teams Mobile, Skype for Business, PSTN).

• New administrative policies for compliance recording, including integration with existing Teams administrative calling and meeting tools and policies.

Compliance Recording can be enabled on Microsoft 365 A3/A5/E3/E5/Business Premium, Office 365 A3/A5/E3/E5 users, Teams Rooms license, or Microsoft Teams Shared Devices license.

Note

Compliance recording is currently not supported for E911 emergency calling services.

The compliance recording solution integration capabilities were also reviewed at Ignite 2019 in the Compliance Recording and Microsoft Teams session.

Teams interaction recording overview

Interaction recording use cases can effectively be separated into four primary categories of recording functionality – Convenience, Functional, Organizational, and Lawful Intercept, as shown in the image:

Each category has different requirements. The requirements vary for how recordings are initiated, what is recorded, where recordings are stored, who is notified, who controls access, and how retention is handled.

Type	Convenience (Regular Teams Recording)	Org - Regulated (Compliance Recording)
Initiator	User	Admin (system)
Target	Per-call / meeting	Per-user
Storage owner	User	Compliance
Notification required?	Yes	Yes
Access Owner	User	Compliance
Retention Policy?	Optional	Yes

Teams provides various capabilities for convenient and functional recording of meetings and live events. Organizational recording is allowing orgs with Microsoft Teams for calling and meetings to decide through an admin policy when calls and meetings should automatically be recorded. Orgs also decide when calls and meetings should be captured for subsequent processing and retention as required by relevant corporate or regulatory policy.

Users with this assigned policy know that their digital interactions with Teams are being recorded. They also know that they can't disable the recording and don't have access to the recording once the interaction is complete. The recording becomes part of the organizational archive. This archive is available to compliance and legal personnel for eDiscovery, legal hold, and other corporate retention uses.

Example user needs

Persona	Needs
Recorded users	Be notified when recording is in progress. Be informed when policy and/or recorder error is causing changes in calling behavior.
Communications admin	Understand why and how to apply / enforce recording policies to Teams users / endpoints. Configure and maintain Teams recording policies for the organization. Monitor and troubleshoot recording-related issues with Teams calls and meetings. Support internal compliance officer with operational analytics on usage, quality, and reliability.
Compliance officer	Collect all Teams communications in the manner required to meet compliance obligations in appropriate regional boundaries. Search for interactions based on communication-related metadata or interaction content. Common examples include: Metadata - Participants, time, direction, dialed number, origin number, Custom business data. Content – Transcription, sentiment, phonetics, related interactions. Analyze and interact with collected communications, including the ability to monitor interactions as they're being collected. Ensure security of collected communications and prevent tampering at all stages.

Solution architecture overview

Compliance recording solutions are integrated with Teams as shown in the following diagram:

Note

This solution is designed specifically to enable policy-based compliance recording with Teams. Any other use of this solution will not be supported.

Recorder

The core component of the compliance recording solution is the recorder. Recorders are built as scalable Azure-based services (bots) that use Microsoft's communications platform and register as applications with Microsoft Graph. The recorder provides the direct interaction with the Teams calls and meetings communications platform APIs and provides the endpoint for media ingestion.

A sample compliance recorder application is available that shows how to configure the bot, create the app instance and assign the compliance policies. The sample also has examples on API usage for recording specific interactions such as handling incoming call routing, changing recording states, and removing the user who is being recorded. Graph documentation on the specific APIs can be found here for updateRecordingStatus and incomingContext.

The exact implementation of the recorder service varies by partner, but must be designed to support multiple recorders. This requirement is necessary to achieve high availability and geographical distribution of deployment to reduce latency from Teams to the recorder. In addition, it is expected that Recorders themselves be designed with resiliency and redundancy in mind.

Partners must confirm the minimum required release version of the Microsoft Graph communications APIs and SDKs with Microsoft before submitting their solution for certification. This requirement ensures that all requirements of compliance recording integration are supported.

Requirements that are fundamental for compliance recording scenario:

• Recorder bot must be deployed in Azure.

• Recorder bot must run on a Windows VM in Azure.

• Recorder bot outbound firewall destination IP address must be open to the Azure public IP range.

• Recorder bot inbound firewall source IP address must be open to the Azure public IP range.

The Azure and Windows VM requirements only apply to the Teams Bot component, which means that a partner might implement the rest of the platform of their choice provided they can meet the relevant performance and functional requirements for compliance recording.

Compliance recording policy assignment and provisioning

Through creating and assigning compliance recording policies, IT Administrators can determine which users are to be recorded and which recorder is used for each user. Recorders are automatically invited to participate in conversations based on the configuration of these policies when a communication interaction takes place. Compliance recording policies are managed using Microsoft PowerShell and can be applied at the tenant, per-user, and security group level for each organization. You can find more information on Microsoft Learn for Meeting policies, calling policies and group policies.

1. Create an application instance in your tenant.

   PS C:\> New-CsOnlineApplicationInstance -UserPrincipalName cr.instance@contoso.onmicrosoft.com -DisplayName ComplianceRecordingBotInstance -ApplicationId fcc88ff5-a42d-49cf-b3d8-f2e1f609d511
   
   RunspaceId        : 4c13efa6-77bc-42db-b5bf-bdd62cdfc5df
   ObjectId          : 5069aae5-c451-4983-9e57-9455ced220b7
   TenantId          : 5b943d7c-5e14-474b-8237-5022eb8e0dc9
   UserPrincipalName : cr.instance@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
   ApplicationId     : fcc88ff5-a42d-49cf-b3d8-f2e1f609d511
   DisplayName       : ComplianceRecordingBotInstance
   PhoneNumber       :
   

   PS C:\> Sync-CsOnlineApplicationInstance -ObjectId 5069aae5-c451-4983-9e57-9455ced220b7
   

2. Create a Compliance Recording policy.

   PS C:\> New-CsTeamsComplianceRecordingPolicy -Identity TestComplianceRecordingPolicy -Enabled $true -Description "Test policy created by tenant admin"
   
   Identity                        : Global
   ComplianceRecordingApplications : {}
   Enabled                         : True
   WarnUserOnRemoval               : True
   Description                     : Test policy created by tenant admin
   

   PS C:\> Set-CsTeamsComplianceRecordingPolicy -Identity TestComplianceRecordingPolicy `
   -ComplianceRecordingApplications @(New-CsTeamsComplianceRecordingApplication -Id 5069aae5-c451-4983-9e57-9455ced220b7 -Parent TestComplianceRecordingPolicy)
   

   See Set-CsTeamsComplianceRecordingPolicy.

3. Assign the Compliance Recording policy to a user.

   PS C:\> Grant-CsTeamsComplianceRecordingPolicy -Identity testuser@contoso.onmicrosoft.com -PolicyName TestComplianceRecordingPolicy
   

   See Grant-CsTeamsComplianceRecordingPolicy.

   PS C:\> Get-CsOnlineUser testuser@contoso.onmicrosoft.com | select SipAddress, TenantId, TeamsComplianceRecordingPolicy | fl
   
   UserPrincipalName              : testuser@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
   TenantId                       : 5b943d7c-5e14-474b-8237-5022eb8e0dc9
   TeamsComplianceRecordingPolicy : TestComplianceRecordingPolicy
   

User experiences

Support for notifications is enabled using the Teams client experiences. The experiences can be either visual or audio.

Teams clients - visual notice

• Desktop/web
• Mobile (iOS/Android)
• Teams Phones
• Teams rooms

Other endpoints - audio notice

• SIP phones
• Skype for Business
• Audio conferencing (audio notice in dial-in number's default or user-selected language)
• PSTN callers (audio notice in Teams user's default language)

Note

Compliance Recording is not supported with Conference mode call queues. Please use Transfer mode call queues. Compliance Recording will not work if users have experienced an Internet outage, and are making and receiving PSTN calls using an SBA.

Compliance recording for Teams certification programs

In addition to publishing publicly available APIs allowing partners to develop and integrate CCaaS solutions with Teams, we developed the compliance recording for Microsoft Teams certification program. This program provides customers with the assurance that each participating partner's solution is tested and verified. Customers can be assured that partners provide the quality, compatibility, and reliability they expect from Microsoft solutions.

The following partners certify their solution for Microsoft Teams.

Partner	Solution website
ASC Technologies	https://www.asctechnologies.com/english/ASC_Recording_Insights_Compliance_Recording_for_Microsoft_Teams.html
AudioCodes	https://online.audiocodes.com/smarttap-360-live-for-microsoft-teams
CallCabinet	https://www.callcabinet.com/compliance-microsoft-teams-call-recording
Dubber	https://www.dubber.net/call-recording/
Insightful Technology	https://insightfultechnology.com/teams/
Mida Solutions	https://www.midasolutions.com/recorder-for-teams/
NICE Engage	https://www.nice.com/products/workforce-engagement/call-recording/air-and-engage
NICE NTR-X	https://www.niceactimize.com/compliance/ms-teams-recording.html
Numonix	https://numonix.cloud
Oak Innovation	https://www.oakinnovate.com/clarify
Red Box	https://www.redboxvoice.com/compliance-recording-for-microsoft-teams
Theta Lake	https://thetalake.com/integrations/microsoft/
Verint	https://www.verba.com/solutions/microsoft-teams-recording
Oak Innovation	https://www.oakinnovate.com/clarify

The following partners are in the process of certifying their solution for Microsoft Teams.

Partner	Solution website
Cloud World Wide Services	https://recordia.net/microsoft-teams-call-recording/
GuardRec	https://www.guardrec.com/en/teams-compliance-recording/
Landis Technologies	https://landistechnologies.com/
Luware	https://luware.com/en/solution/microsoft-teams-recording/
Redwood Technologies	https://www.contentguru.com/en-gb/solutions/needs/compliance-recording-ms-teams/

This list gets updated as more partners join and meet the certification criteria.

Support boundaries

Microsoft supports Compliance Recording solutions only from the certified partners. If there are issues, you must contact your Compliance Recording partner first. If needed, the Compliance Recording partner will bring the issue to Microsoft through internal channels. Microsoft may reject support cases where a non-certified Compliance Recording solution is used, or if investigation shows the issue is one that the partner can address.

Next steps

If you need to provide more context and details, send a mail to Teamscategorypartner@microsoft.com. If you're a vendor seeking to join the certification program, fill out the calling platform intake as the next step.

Calling Platform Intake