Your Teams Call Recording Policies Probably Don't Do What You Want

Teams Convenience Call/Meeting Recording

Firstly, I want to highlight this applies to the convenience call recording feature in Teams. There are two types of call recording, compliance, where the business controls the recording of calls, this may be for phone calls, Teams calls, or meetings. Whatever the use case, this will be done by a third party platform. A subject for another post. Then there is convenience call recording, where a meeting host or caller, might want to record a call to refer to later, or share the content with others. These often expire and are automatically deleted after a period of time.

Here, we’re talking exclusively about Teams convenience call recording.

A Common Set of Policies

While working with a client recently, they had this regularly common policy set.

Teams meeting policy showing meetings can be recorded — A meeting policy that allows meetings to be recorded and transcribed

Teams meeting policy showing one-to-one calls cannot be recorded — A calling policy that prevents one-to-one calls from being recorded.

The client believed this allowed meetings to be recorded, and recording of one-to-one calls blocked.

There was a business narrative around why these policies were in place. However, none of which held any technical weight. The business logic was sound, but the technical logic is more nuanced.

The key technical challenges, when a one-to-one call is not a one-to-one call, and when your calling externally.

Calling externally

I’ll start with the second scenario.

If you’re calling someone outside your organisation, and their organisation has enabled one-to-one calls to be recorded, the person you are calling will be able to initiate the call recording, and, the call will be stored in callees OneDrive, outside your organisation!

Screenshot of a caller not being able to record a call — The callers experience in a one-to-one call

Screenshot of a callee able to record a call — The callees experience in a one-to-one call

When a one-to-one call is not a one-to-one call

This first scenario is a little more complex.

As soon as a third party is introduced to a call, the call is no longer a one-to-one call. It’s technically a meeting. This explains why when you bring someone else into the call, the option to record suddenly becomes available.

However, even if the other person doesn’t pickup, the call still becomes a meeting. As soon as you try and add someone, the call becomes a meeting, even if the number you are trying to add is not real (in the case of having Teams Phone), or the person you’re trying to add is offline or does not have a Teams license.

In this scenario, I just added a number that would route to nowhere, and I was able to record the call.

Yes, both parties will receive a prompt noting that the call is being recorded, but this may contravene your business policies.

Summary

Just because you have technical policies in place that you believe should stop certain actions, you can’t assume there won’t be “features” that workaround the control.

Is this clear to administrators? No.

Is this a feature or a bug? I’m not sure I have a position on that.

The call to action, make sure you have business policies in place that ensure your users know the rules!