Many organizations require calls and meetings to be recorded for regulatory or compliance reasons, others may want to record calls for monitoring and training. Microsoft Teams includes recording in the box, but it is for individual users to selectively record for their convenience.

With convenience recording, the user, provided the feature is enabled, which it is by default, can record calls or meetings and have access to the recording on their OneDrive.

For regulatory recording, all calls and meetings need to be recorded and the user may not have access to edit or delete them. Microsoft call this recording type Policy-based Recording or Compliance Recording.

Compliance Recording can be enabled on Microsoft 365 A3/A5/E3/E5/Business Premium, Office 365 A3/A5/E3/E5 users, Teams Rooms license, or a Microsoft Teams Shared Devices license. However it is not included in Microsoft Teams, you must use a Microsoft Teams certified third party compliance recording solution.

14 providers are certified by Microsoft to provide compliance recording. These solutions have the capability to record PSTN and VoIP calls and meetings, including video and screen sharing. Some of these features, such as video recording, may be an additional feature/cost. Some solutions will also compliance record chat, but not all solutions do this.

All solutions use Azure Recorders bots which leverage Microsoft's communications platform and register as applications with Microsoft Graph. The recorder provides direct interaction with the Teams calls and meetings communications platform APIs and provides the endpoint for media ingestion.

The exact implementation of the recorder service will vary by partner but must be designed to support multiple recorders in order to achieve high availability and geographical distribution of deployment to reduce latency from Teams to the recorder. Beyond the recorder bot third party solutions will differentiate on their solutions architecture, features, interface, support and commercial models.

Other differentiations that may influence solution choice include being listed in the Azure Marketplace (an easy way to transact directly) and being Microsoft 365 app certified, an additional level of application certification from Microsoft.

Solutions are available for as little as 20 user minimum and scale to hundreds of thousands of users if required.

Setup of compliance recording is very easy, with the majority of solutions being SaaS and some being true multitenant SaaS. Administrators must do a 1 time setup to integrate the recording solution with their Microsoft 365 tenant, then create a compliance recording policy and assign it to the relevant users. This assignment can be automated if required.

The user is free to make Teams calls and meetings as before from any supported endpoint, software, or hardware. In the Teams’ client, users on a compliance recorded call will get a visual banner to notify all users the session is being recorded, on SIP phones or PSTN calls it will be an audio prompt.

If you need help with vendor selection or compliance call recording setup, Pure IP has set up compliance recording for many customers with certified partner solutions and are happy to help and advise.