Teams Adds Retention Policies and Unified Admin Center

• Teams retention policies can control how long chat and channel messages are kept and could be useful for legal compliance.
• A new Business Admin Center provides a unified, but limited, administration portal for Teams and Skype for Business Online.
• Compliance and management capabilities will be important future priorities as Microsoft positions Teams to replace Skype for Business.

Teams is a Microsoft-hosted service that provides persistent one-to-one and team-based chat, voice and video meetings, telephony, and integrations with other Office 365 and external services. Teams is slated to eventually replace Skype for Business Online, with feature parity between the two services planned by the end of 2018. However, policy enforcement and management capabilities for Teams have lagged behind the service’s new end-user capabilities. New retention policies and a unified administrative portal could help organizations meet compliance requirements and improve Teams administration.