Hello all
We have recently introduced Teams at the University of Huddersfield and have hit a potential snag relating to chat retention policies. I’ll give some background below, but my questions in short are:
1) Has anyone implemented more than one chat retention policy (or one policy applicable to one group only, with remaining users having no policy)? Could you possibly tell me about your approach?
2) For universities, how long would you keep interactions between staff and students in Teams chat?
3) Any other advice on the issues raised below will be much appreciated!
We were intending to implement a retention policy of something like 6 months on chat messages for staff in Teams (not channel messages), with guidance given that chat is for informal conversations only and anything important that is said there should be moved to a more appropriate location within the 6 months. This was prompted by concerns about the chat messages otherwise being retained forever, which, in addition to just getting unwieldy, has implications for things such as Subject Access Requests.
However, we’re a university and our students will soon be getting access to Teams. As well as students chatting to other students, they would also be able to interact with staff. Andrew Warland very kindly tested for me what would happen when a retention policy is applied to one person in a chat conversation (ie if we apply a short chat retention policy to staff, but not students). Alas, what happens is that the chat messages are removed for both sides of the conversation – that is, neither staff nor student can see either the messages they sent or the messages they received.
Therefore, in order to retain interactions between staff and students for longer, we couldn’t apply the short chat retention policy to any members of staff who interact with students. But, because chat retention policies are based on the user and not the purpose, this would mean that all their informal chats with other staff were also retained for that extended retention period.
On a related note, we are also uncertain about how long to retain interactions between students and staff in Teams chat in any case. The intention would be that Teams chat messages were only used for informal discussions and formative feedback (as might have occurred in person), but with the whole idea of using Teams for teaching being so new, it is very difficult to be certain about what staff and students may find useful and what practices they might want to adopt. Would we therefore need to retain staff/student chats for completion of student’s programme + 6 years? We would really appreciate information on what other universities may have chosen to do.
My feeling is that retention policies based on the user are less than ideal. Retention policies should be based on the purpose/content of the messages, not who sent/received them. However, I’m not sure how that would ever be possible without the user have to select the retention policy themselves for each chat, much like applying a retention label. I wonder if the limited options for chat retention is something that could be raised with Microsoft as part of the roundtable discussions that have happened/are planned, but I’m not sure what the solution would be.
Please reply either on- of off-list; to email me directly, use s.astill at hud.ac.uk.
Thank you very much
Sian
Sian Astill
Assistant Records Manager and Archivist
University of Huddersfield
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