On or around October 5 2020, Microsoft changed the mailbox location where Teams stores its compliance records captured for personal chat and channel conversation messages. Microsoft didn’t communicate this change, presumably as they thought that compliance processing is a background task that tenants cannot control.
What changed?
Compliance messages for private Teams Chats were previously stored in \Conversation History\Teams Chat Folder but are now stored in a non_ipm_subtree folder called TeamsMessagesData.
For about a month after the change, Teams compliance records existed in both the old and new locations in Exchange. As of Nov. 6th, in accordance with their 'Plan of Record', Microsoft ran a background process that moved records from the Exchange Team Chat folder to the new folder TeamsMessagesData.
What’s the impact?
In terms of programmatic access to these messages, this change affects the ability of the Graph (and Outlook REST) Endpoints to access them. While you could never access the Folder directly with the Graph API (because of the FolderClass) the messages themselves would appear in the \Messages endpoint (this is because the chats were captured by the underlying AllItems Search folder that backs this Endpoint).
Now that the chat messages are in the Non_IPM_Subtree you lose the ability of that Search Folder to access those messages.
How to access the Endpoints
The Graph and Outlook REST Endpoints can't be used to access these compliance records anymore (unless you create your own search folder to expose them). However, you can still use EWS to access them by switching the code from using the Outlook Rest Endpoint to EWS to access these messages.
Workaround
If you are unable to update to 11.20.36 or higher, there is a workaround. To add the new folder to backups you need to add an additional setting:
IncludeTeamsMessagesData
Location = HKLM\SOFTWARE\Commvault Systems\Galaxy\Instance001\MSExchangeMBAgent
DWORD
Value = 1
Note that this will backup the new Teams folder in full and then incrementals from there. While teams data is relatively small in most sites, you will see a jump in protection data as we need to grab this folder as a full the first time. Some larger sites that are TEAMS heavy make sees a noticeable bump or increase in backup time for this data.
Commvault updates
We have made and published a fix, available with 11.20.36. This has restored the ability to backup the private Teams chat messages. This does not require any additional settings or scripts, and the same fix has been forward ported to all service packs released since then.
Please download the following Maintenance Release (or later) and apply to the Commserve, Media Agents, and Exchange iDA.
Want to learn more?
For additional information check out these resources:
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https://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2020/12/getting-teams-chat-history-messages.html
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https://office365itpros.com/2020/10/14/microsoft-changes-location-teams-compliance-records/
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