Microsoft Teams Chats — Overview

Introduction

The Microsoft Teams Chats Connector enables RecordPoint customers to integrate their Microsoft Teams (Microsoft 365) environment with the RecordPoint platform for compliant records management. This connector captures Teams channel and chat messages as daily records to support retention, disposal, eDiscovery, and audit-readiness obligations.

This connector is particularly suited for organisations in regulated industries — such as financial services, government, and critical infrastructure — where Teams is the primary collaboration tool and chat content routinely contains business-critical decisions, approvals, and communications that must be retained as records.

Key Capabilities

There are four ways to chat with people in Teams:

• In a channel on the Posts tab (with everyone on the team who follows that channel)
• In a group chat (with a few people at once, but outside of a channel)
• In a one-on-one chat (with one other person)
• In a meeting chat (the conversation attached to a scheduled or ad-hoc meeting)

The Microsoft Teams Chat connector captures the second, third, and fourth of these: personal (1:1) chats, group chats, and the chat conversations attached to meetings. Channel conversations are not captured by this connector; they are captured by the separate Microsoft Teams Channels connector.

The connector treats each Teams group, one-on-one, or meeting chat as the aggregation boundary. Messages within a conversation are grouped by calendar day (using a UTC midnight boundary) and captured as a single Daily Chat Record. Each daily record includes an HTML transcript of that day's messages, and any file attachments from those messages are ingested as separate binaries linked to the same daily record.

Message edits and deletions made within a rolling seven-day window are reflected by rebuilding the affected day's transcript. Channel and chat membership is captured to preserve access context for each conversation.

Note: Edits to messages older than seven days, and daily boundaries that differ from a customer's local calendar day (UTC is used as the standard), are known limitations. Ingestion of a day's record occurs after the day completes, so there is a minimum latency of approximately one day.

Default Managed Objects

Teams Channel / Chat (Aggregation)
└── Daily Chat Record (Record)
    ├── Daily Chat Transcript (Binary)
    └── Message Attachment (Binary)

Detailed Entity Table

• The record title has the format {Chat Title} (yyyy-MM-dd), for example Project Kickoff (2026-03-02).
• The chat title is the chat's topic where one has been set. Chats without a topic (such as 1:1 chats) are titled using the participants' display names.
• Each record belongs to an aggregation representing the chat as a whole, so all daily records for a chat are kept together.
• If messages in a day are later edited or deleted, or new messages arrive for that day, the record for that day is resubmitted with the updated content.
• System event messages, such as members being added or the chat being renamed, are not captured. Call events (call started, call ended, call recording available, and call transcript available) are captured as part of the day's conversation.

How disposal works

When a record is disposed in RecordPoint, the connector deletes the record's content at the source:

• The file attachments belonging to the record's day are deleted from their source location (the files are moved to the recycle bin of the OneDrive or SharePoint site where Teams stored them).
• The conversation transcript and record metadata are destroyed in RecordPoint as part of the normal disposal process.

When the Delete whole chat on first record disposal option is enabled, disposing the first record of a chat (identified by the Is First Record metadata field) additionally deletes the entire chat at the source. The chat thread is removed from Microsoft Teams for all participants. Microsoft performs this as a soft delete: tenant administrators have seven days to restore a deleted chat, after which it cannot be recovered.

This option is disabled by default. Enable it only if your retention policy requires chat conversations to be destroyed at the source when their records are disposed, and note that disposing the first record removes the whole conversation, including days covered by records that have not yet reached the end of their retention period. It is recommended that all records of a chat are managed under the same retention schedule when this option is used.

Attachments in Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint

When a file is attached to a Teams chat, Teams uploads the file to the sender's OneDrive (or to a SharePoint location for some chat types), and the chat message links to it. The connector ingests the file as part of the chat record. Note the following:

• If a OneDrive or SharePoint connector is also monitoring the same location, a duplicate record of the file may be created by that connector.
• If the file is later modified or deleted directly in OneDrive or SharePoint, the Teams Chat connector does not detect the change unless the chat itself is updated.
• On disposal, the connector deletes the source file from OneDrive or SharePoint. If the file was already moved or deleted, the disposal of the remaining content still completes.
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After the connector is enabled:

• The connector will start operating according to the configuration you have set.

• Teams messages from the configured Microsoft 365 environment will be aggregated into daily chat records and submitted to RecordPoint, where they are managed according to your rules and Classification Intelligence.

Note: Because daily records are submitted after each UTC day completes, expect a minimum ingestion latency of approximately one day before new records appear.