For me, the biggest announcement at Ignite this year was the transformation that Microsoft Stream is set to go through. Here is everything you need to know about the New Microsoft Stream and Teams Meeting Recordings.
New Microsoft Stream
It appears to me that Stream will shift away from trying to be a core workload and instead move towards being more like an App, such as Word or PowerPoint, sitting on top of the existing, more mature workloads. What this means is, all Stream content, including Teams Meeting Recordings, will now be stored in SharePoint/OneDrive – leveraging all the powerful information governance that comes with these!
In the above slide, we can see that new Stream is going to allow you to:
- Organise and discover videos
- Consume and search for videos across SharePoint and Teams
- Create video “everywhere”
Governance & Compliance
Historically, Stream has been a roque entity, sitting just out of reach from our information governance policies. Microsoft could have spent the next two years bringing support for all the necessary information governance controls into Stream, but why bother if you can just store the files in SharePoint instead? Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best!
Storing the files in SharePoint and OneDrive will bring with it all the controls we have grown to rely on in our organisations. For example:
- Granular Permissions
- External Sharing
- Request Access Flow
- Retention and Expiration Policies
- Information Governance
- “Go Local” and Multi-Geo support
- API Access to files
Teams Meeting Recordings
The headliner for the new Microsoft Stream was easily Teams Meeting Recordings which, as with all other videos, will also now be stored in SharePoint.
Non-channel meetings will be stored in the OneDrive of the person who hit the record button. Channel meetings, however, will be stored in the teams SharePoint site in the channel document library. In both cases, recordings will be stored in a dedicated ‘Recordings’ folder to make them easy to find.
According to Microsoft, 99% of meeting recordings are not accessed after 60 days so can be an unnecessary drain on your resources. Also, these recordings will consume your SharePoint and OneDrive storage quota, so it will be useful to cleanse these when they are no longer needed. You will be able to apply specific retention and deletion policies to Teams Meeting Recordings using Keyword Query Language (KQL).
You can also set a recording expiration policy in the Teams admin portal which will automatically cleanse the meetings after the defined period which by default will be set to 60 days as below.
Migrating Existing Recordings
Of course, people have been recording their Teams meetings for some time now, especially in recent months. Thankfully, Microsoft have got your back on this and have announced they will be offering an admin-led migration capability in H1 2021, later followed by an end-user led migration. This will allow the migration of existing recordings from Stream into SharePoint/OneDrive to start making the most of all the benefits mentioned above.
Feature Gaps
As is to be expected nowadays, this launch is not going to be perfect and Microsoft have pre-empted the complaints by being quite transparent about what will be missing at launch.
- Cannot Block Download of Videos
- Only English Transcripts – more languages coming soon after
- No transcript search capability
- Transcripts will not be editable as they are currently in Stream.
I don’t think these are too worrying in the short-term, but I do hope these gaps are filled soon. I also hope that the transcription service is drastically improved – even the English support is weak.
Opting-In/Out
At launch, only customers that have opted-in will have their Teams Meeting Recordings stored in OneDrive. Secondly, in mid Q4 2020 only customers who have not opted-out will then default to OneDrive. Finally, all remaining customers will be moved over which is expected in Q1 2021.
To opt-in:
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -RecordingStorageMode "OneDriveForBusiness"
To opt-out:
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -RecordingStorageMode "Stream"
Important!
While the default value for RecodingStorageMode is “Stream”, only those that have been explicitly set will be deemed opted-out.
