A new Teams Chat retention policy will be implemented as part of our ongoing support for proper records management, protecting the University’s information, and lowering the risk of incidents or harm caused by information being kept forever.

This project’s scope is to apply a retention policy on all chat content in the Chat portion of Microsoft Teams (person-to-person chats, group chats, and chats generated from a scheduled or ad-hoc Teams meeting). Starting August 1, a testing phase will begin with the ITS Client Services test group, where chat history will be retained for 180 days.

During this testing phase, you may notice that your chat history with an ITS Client Services member will go back to 180 days. If you have any important information in your chats that you would like to retain, please visit the IPO portal page on how to extract that chat content. We welcome your questions and feedback at Privacy@MacEwan.ca.

The university-wide implementation of the chat retention policy will begin on October 1 with 180 days of chat content, then reduce the chat content to 90 days in November, 60 days in December, and 30 days in January 2024. The gradual reduction in chat history duration aims to balance information accessibility and data protection.

The Information and Privacy Office (IPO) has created guidance documents and training sessions to guide you through this transition. Details can be found on the IPO portal page. Thank you for your support as we enhance our data protection measures.

See what is changing and what to adopt.

Note: the chat content in the Channels of a Team is not within this project’s scope.

From the Information and Privacy Office