Microsoft Teams compliance recording

What is Microsoft Teams compliance recording?

Compliance recording is the automatic, policy-driven capture of Microsoft Teams calls and meetings so that an organization can prove, later, exactly what was communicated. It exists for a specific reason: regulated firms cannot rely on individual employees to decide, call by call, whether a conversation is recorded. Instead, an administrator assigns a compliance recording policy to the users who fall in scope, and from that moment every call those users make or receive is captured — with no button to press and no way to quietly turn it off.

Microsoft Teams provides the policy framework and the interface for a certified recording application to join calls. The recording itself is performed by that application. Our service provides and fully manages that application for you: a purpose-built Microsoft Graph Communications recording bot running on a server dedicated to your organization. You handle the Microsoft 365 side — assigning the policy to the right users — and we run everything else.

Why the native Record button isn't enough

Microsoft Teams includes a built-in Record button, and for casual meetings it's perfectly fine. For compliance, it has structural gaps that matter:

• It's manual.Someone has to remember to start recording on every single call. One forgotten click is one uncaptured conversation — and in a dispute or an audit, that's exactly the call you needed.
• It's not governed by policy. Native recording is a per-meeting choice, not an enforced organizational rule. In-scope users can simply not record.
• It doesn't separate speakers. Native recordings are a single mixed track, which makes accurate attribution on busy multi-party calls difficult.
• Storage and retention aren't compliance-grade by default.Recordings land in a user's OneDrive or a channel's SharePoint with default retention, not in a governed archive built around your regulatory obligation.

Compliance recording closes every one of these gaps. For a fuller side-by-side, see our guide on native recording versus compliance recording.

How our compliance recording works

The recording bot can join a call four different ways, so you can cover both policy-scoped users and ad-hoc scenarios:

• Compliance policy. The primary method. Assign the policy to a user and the bot joins every one of their calls automatically, with the Teams recording banner shown to participants.
• Manual join. Add the bot to any specific call or meeting on demand when you want a one-off recorded session.
• Calendar auto-join. The bot monitors Exchange Online calendars for a defined group and joins scheduled meetings automatically — no policy assignment required.
• Direct calls. Direct 1:1 calls to and from in-scope users are captured too, so nothing slips through the gaps between meetings.

The four methods are described in more detail on the recording bot and how it works pages.

What gets captured

Every recorded call produces both a combined recording and per-participant (unmixed) audio, so each voice is captured on its own track. That separation is what makes attribution reliable — even when several people talk at once, you can tell exactly who said what.

Each recording is then transcribed automatically using Azure AI Speech-to-Text with speaker diarization, producing a searchable transcript labelled by speaker. The result is that every conversation becomes both listenable audio and readable, auditable text. Read more on the transcription page.

Where recordings are stored

Recordings and transcripts upload automatically to a SharePoint document library in your own Microsoft 365 tenant. That keeps the evidence inside your environment, under your access controls and your retention rules — not on a third-party platform you can't govern. If you want the full picture of where Teams recordings can end up, see where are Teams recordings stored.

Retention & regulations

Different regulators require different retention periods, and getting them wrong is itself a violation. The service applies configurable retention so recordings are kept for as long as your obligation requires:

• Financial services (US). SEC Rule 17a-4 and FINRA books-and-records rules require broker-dealers to preserve business communications, commonly for three to six years, with recent records readily accessible.
• Dodd-Frank. Swap dealers and similar entities generally retain relevant communications for at least five years.
• MiFID II.Firms must record communications relating to transactions and retain them for five years, extendable to seven at a competent authority's request.
• Healthcare (HIPAA).Recordings that contain protected health information must be secured, access-controlled, and retained per your organization's HIPAA policies.

Our industry pages go deeper on each: financial services, healthcare, and legal. You can also read our full retention requirements guide.

Why a dedicated server matters for compliance

Most compliance recording products are multi-tenant SaaS: your recordings are processed and stored alongside other organizations' data, separated only by software boundaries. We take a different approach. Every client runs on a single-tenant dedicated serverthat we provision, host in the US, and fully manage. Your recordings, transcripts, configuration, and processing are never co-mingled with anyone else's.

For compliance and security teams, that isolation is a meaningful reduction in risk surface — and it's a differentiator almost no competitor offers. Learn more on our security page and managed service overview.

Frequently asked questions