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Microsoft Teams e-discovery enabled for hybrid clouds

Microsoft is giving businesses with on-premises Exchange servers a new tool for Microsoft Teams e-discovery, as the vendor seeks to help large enterprises transition to the cloud.

Jonathan Dame
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Published: 15 Jun 2018

For businesses with on-premises Exchange mailboxes, Microsoft will facilitate the electronic discovery of Microsoft Teams chats -- a feature that should appeal to large enterprises in the process of migrating to the cloud.

Upon request, Microsoft will create cloud-based mailboxes for the sole purpose of storing the Teams chat data of users with on-premises Exchange mailboxes. Those users must have their on-premises identities synced to the cloud in Office 365's Azure Active Directory. 

Organizations that take advantage of the tool will be able to search, preview and export Teams chat data stored in the cloud. That activity could be useful for Microsoft Teams e-discovery cases, compliance reviews or data service requests related to the General Data Protection Regulation.

However, businesses won't be able to apply Office 365 retention policies to that chat data or place it on hold. In a blog post announcing Microsoft Teams e-discovery for hybrid setups, Microsoft said it would "provide more updates about our plan to address this gap soon."

Microsoft Teams muddles path to cloud for large enterprises

Microsoft needs to continue to promote hybrid capabilities, such as its new Microsoft Teams e-discovery feature, to help on-premises customers feel comfortable with the transition to the cloud -- a process that could take years.

"It's messy to be in the middle, and I think Microsoft forgets that if you've got 100,000 people, you're going to live in the middle for a long time," said Kevin Kieller, a partner at consulting firm EnableUC in Oakville, Ont.

Many large enterprises with on-premises Skype for Business deployments had previously been gearing up to transition to the cloud version of that platform, Kieller said. Then, Microsoft introduced Teams last year, significantly complicating the cloud migration path for those businesses.

Microsoft has been steadily rolling out interoperability features between Skype for Business and Teams over the past several months, such as persistent chats and aggregated presence. But almost all of those features require businesses to have their employees registered through Skype for Business Online, the cloud version of the service.

"As far as I've seen, there isn't really a good and easy way to migrate from Skype for Business on-prem to Teams," said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research in Westminster, Mass. "It just seems like [Microsoft] didn't think about it very well."

Advanced telephony features for Teams coming soon

Microsoft is on track to add dozens of telephony features to Teams that are critical to large enterprises by the end of June, including call queues and organizational auto attendants. The final advanced calling features are expected to come online by year's end.

The perception that Microsoft Teams lacks the full capabilities of Skype for Business has slowed adoption of the platform, particularly among large enterprises. But even as those features get added, Microsoft faces another hurdle: perception.

It could take months to get the message across that Teams is fully built-out, Kieller said. "Microsoft has a tough time, as everybody does, in terms of discoverability of the right information for somebody that's contemplating this migration."

Still, there is no end date in sight for support of Skype for Business on premises. However, while Microsoft plans to release a new on-premises server in 2019, the vendor is expected to keep some of its latest and most advanced collaboration tools as cloud-only offerings.

"It's almost, by definition, going to be a hybrid mode," Kieller said. "It's just another way that I think Microsoft, even for on-prem customers ... [is] effectively pushing them, moving them, cajoling them to move to the cloud."

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