It wasn’t actually a secret, just not commonly known.
Yesterday I read an article about how my State is not responding to FOIA requests for Teams chat because it’s their policy to delete them after 30 days due to space constraints but email are held for 7 years.
I’m a subscriber to this excellent new non-profit new agency, so I felt compelled to help them. Because I happen to know that Teams chat, and channel messages for that matter, are held in Exchange within the users mailbox.
So I sent them this – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/edisc-search-teams#where-teams-content-is-stored which details out where each type of content is stored in Microsoft Teams.
While these folders are hidden to the user, the content is discoverable using eDiscovery in a few quick clicks. I also sent them instructions for how to do it.
Finally, while it is possible to permanently delete the content stored in these folders, it’s not a simple process. I can’t imagine that State IT staff are sitting around performing that task daily for every Teams user to make sure that content is retained for more than 30 days. But, just for information purposes, I also sent instructions for how do this too. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/edisc-search-teams-data
In summary, there’s no reason why Teams data should be excluded from FOIA. The argument that they need to save space, doesn’t match up with holding email for 7 years, since this data too is email in the same mailboxes.
When you don’t know something and why should they, you can be told incorrect information and it sounds legit. But it’s not.
