Backing up Microsoft Teams? There’s a better way to preserve your chats.

Microsoft Teams is now the world’s most popular business communications platform – a particularly handy tool for the new world of hybrid working.

If you want to save Teams chats and recordings for future reference, here’s an effective way to do it.

Important information is shared in chats and video conferences. Agreements are made. Valuable, sometimes business-critical, data is sent as attachments.

You or your HR or legal people will probably need to refer back to these chats, meetings or attachments at some point.

You might want to confirm who said what or what was decided, or find an essential figure.

Financial services companies must, by law, keep copies of these communications. In the wider business world though, it’s simply good practice to preserve copies of all communications, including those in Teams.

Archiving v backups

Many organisations aren’t keeping Teams files in a way that will be helpful to them when they need the information.

The traditional backup products they use only take snapshots of communications rather than preserving them in their entirety. This approach could leave out important data.

What’s more, participants in these Teams sessions can modify or delete conversations – for example, if they’re worried about other people seeing or hearing something they said.

Also, Teams’ search function is limited. It can be tricky and time-consuming finding a conversation you’ve had with somebody, a particular piece of information, or an attachment.

This is why Cryoserver built archiving tools that are much more effective for preserving and retrieving Team communications than traditional backup tools.

Our solution  securely stores all your organisation’s Teams interactions – be they text, video or voice – in real time, in their entirety.

And unlike Teams’ own search tool, ours enables you to find what you’re looking for quickly.

How it works

Cryoserver introduces the box shown below into the user interface. This one is ticked for IM (instant messaging) as opposed to email.

Just type in a key phrase used in a chat or conference that you’re searching for, add a rough time frame for when the conversation took place, and a participant’s name. Or include the file name of an attachment.

Cryoserver will then find the relevant snippet or file you’re after in seconds. And you can see the parts of the conversation before and after that segment. Any screenshots and attachments will be included.

Cryoserver for Teams allows you to:

• Search within time windows
• Use filters to search both internal and external  conversations
• Refine your results to only conversations you’ve had with third parties, or only internal communications

Helping HR and compliance

With a compliance, disciplinary or legal matter, our solution allows you to search all Teams communications and find what you need quickly.

HR can use it to help stamp out racist, sexist or other inappropriate language that should not be used in your organisation.

For example, a compliance manager can do a text search in Teams for swear words that should not be used either internally or with clients. If there are hits, the manager can see who used the terms.

You can even set up search criteria to run on a regular basis so that if a term is found, the HR department is automatically notified.

In a legal dispute, lawyers can look at all conversations and find out who said what, and when they said it.

Archiving for the education sector

While some organisations decide they need to archive all emails and IMs, you might need a solution only for saving Teams chats and recordings.

Suppose, for example, you’re an educational establishment. You need your students to submit their coursework through Teams, and you want to preserve the following:

• All coursework submitted
• Attendance records
• Students’ conversations with tutors

Cryoserver for Teams can securely archive all of these, including full videos and transcripts. Then you can use our search tool to quickly refer back to a particular student and the related information listed above.

Time you started archiving Teams?

Whether you’d like to archive only Team communications, or want to preserve emails as well, Cryoserver has a solution. We can also archive other types of instant messages such as Slack.

Let’s discuss your requirements – get in touch.