If you throw 10 coins into a bucket holding 10 average employees, (representative of the sample of all employees) you’re likely to hit an employee that uses Microsoft Teams for daily tasks almost 7 out of the 10 times. In other words, the use of Microsoft Teams across businesses worldwide has dramatically increased in the past year.

However, more use of a social collaboration tool like Microsoft Teams means more data being created daily. With more data being created, compliant archival of said data is paramount.

More collaborating = more communicating. More communicating = more stuff to archive. More stuff to archive = more pressure on regulatory compliance standards.

Businesses using Teams are likely to be using other social collaboration channels as well. For example, organizations rarely send all information or communicate via one channel. Rather, they are likely to use other sources like email, social media, or instant messaging platforms. All these various forms of communication present a challenge to the business to remain compliant.

It may seem like you are fighting an uphill battle, but with the proper compliance archiving solution, you can gain the most value from Microsoft Teams, remain in regulatory compliance, and allow your data to work for you.

So, how does archiving help in remaining in regulatory compliance when using Teams?

Increased Teams Value

Microsoft Teams undoubtedly gives its users some major benefits and has changed the business landscape. Those using Teams are likely familiar with its native archiving capabilities already and may be grudgingly asking if this functionality is sufficient.

It’s not.

Teams generates a wide variety of content types, but its archiving capabilities do not extend to all of them. When content types are ignored by the archive, the door is opened to employees to communicate inappropriately. Additionally, ignored content types are consequently not available for search and eDiscovery, missing the point of archiving in the first place.

Examples of content types ignored by Teams’ native archiving and eDiscovery capabilities:

• Recordings of meetings and calls
• Edits to messages in Teams chat and channels
• Code samples
• Message reactions
• Content in Microsoft planner
• Drawing, annotations, and text when using Microsoft Whiteboard
• Quoted content
• Screen sharing content

When content types are ignored, space is created for compliance issues. Employees begin communicating via channels not included in Teams’ native archiving functions. When this happens, you can’t search it, analyze it, or fix it. Goodbye compliance.

Bringing in a third-party compliance archiving solution can remedy the issues presented when using Teams native archiving. This allows employees to communicate how they will. Additionally, when every content type is archived, your organization can see the full value from Teams.

Using a third-party compliance archive bolsters Teams and allows your business to use it the way it was intended.

Increased Teams Functionality

The native archiving capabilities of Teams can capture many, but not all, content types. A third-party archiving solution can provide advanced customizable workflows and defence against litigation.

A third-party archiving solution captures all the content Teams can do itself. In addition to this, it will also capture reactions to messages, versions of edited messages, animations, images, files, audio, video, notes, and capture from SharePoint links when they were shared, among others not supported by Teams. This opens the gate for Teams and allows your organization to do more with the same platform.

Understanding business communication from a compliance archive with analysis capabilities can help change and tweak current business practices. It can shed light on inefficiencies your team is experiencing in real time, whether known or unknown, that can be fixed to become more efficient.

When you have a separate platform analyzing the communication being sent through Teams, you can better understand how people are actually using it. This is extremely beneficial in optimizing workflows, granting permissions to certain users, and getting the most out of your investment in social collaboration.

Teams Premium (Voice and Video)

Organizations today need to manage voice records for regulatory compliance or internal policy reasons in the same way they handle traditional records (email, IM, SM, etc.) as there are obligations under Dodd-Frank, SEC Rule 17a-4, and Europe MiFID II requiring voice communications be captured, archived, supervised, and available for timely production.

A compliance archive can help provide extensive voice capabilities beginning with the ability to archive, index, search, and playback phone calls and voice recordings from multiple recording vendors within a single system.

If your organization communicates via voice on a digital platform, (does any company not?) then you need the ability to archive recordings in native format, voice speech-to-text transcription to facilitate review, and playback with slice, splice, and stich capabilities.

Analytic enrichment can also provide deeper insight into the conversational context, speaker identification, translation, voice availability for trade reconstruction, and trading turret integration.

A third-party archiving solution can help you automate the capture of full-resolution images, videos, and other file attachments regardless of the device or network used to transmit them.

Teams Managed Service

If you have ever implemented a software at a company before, your hands are likely sweating just thinking about implementing and running another.

Therefore, a third-party compliance archive that offers a managed service could be valuable to you. You don’t have to be the expert in everything if you let a managed services team help. Take advantage of enterprise-class operational support, 24x7x365 automated operations, proactive technical support, and consultative expertise. This allows you to monitor both physical and logical operations in real time.

When you have a managed services team assisting with your archive, it balances strategic and tactical customer satisfaction objectives and results. Having another established company with industry experts with your best interest in mind can alleviate the worries of regulatory compliance and routine platform maintenance, enabling you to focus on the things that matter most.

In Sum

While Microsoft Teams offers native archiving capabilities of much of its content, it ignores other content types, exposing your organization to risk.

You have many different types of content, all needing to be archived to ensure regulatory compliance. Enlisting a third-party compliance archive solution can help your organization search across multiple platforms and content repositories without the need to migrate the data first to a central repository.

Search once and find exactly what you need.

Introducing: Micro Focus Compliance Archiving.

This next-generation platform from Micro Focus—the industry leader in Information Archiving— delivers an enriched, unified Compliance Data Lake that brings all your messaging and collaboration data together and enables authorized users to identify risk and extract business insights quickly and easily.

Archive ALL Microsoft Teams communication content to remain in regulatory compliance and drive your business forward.

 Originally published HERE