Once Upon a Time One Retention Policy Applied to Teams and Copilot Chats

It is true. In the initial rollout of Copilot, a retention policy set for Teams chat applied to Teams chat and Copilot interactions. It was one policy. This made a weird sort of sense because Copilot interactions were pretty similar to Teams chats, the user was chatting with Copilot.

Then, Microsoft realized it was possible that an organization wanted to apply different retention policies to those two things. So, they left the old option in place, but allowed you to choose one or the other.

The key was, if you had originally set it for both, and hadn’t gone back and changed it, the policy was still being enforced on both. It would, however, require you to split it across two different policies if you made a change to that policy but if you hadn’t, you were fine.

That’s about to change:

Some existing retention policies scoped to Microsoft Teams may currently also apply to Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions. As part of an upcoming change, these legacy Teams retention policies will be converted to—and treated as—Teams-only policies. They will no longer implicitly govern Copilot workloads.

If you’re one of those organziations that set retention back when they were one combined policy and then forgot all about it, you may want to go ahead and set two policies up to avoid a disruption in your policies.

We’d hate to see a policy that you’re depending on suddenly disappear on you. Could be a big problem.

 Share this post on social media.