What is Microsoft Teams message scanning?
It is one of Compliance Agent’s four scan areas. It helps you verify adherence to your organisation’s policies: it runs in your own Azure subscription, scans for your organisation’s keywords and patterns, and reports. You define the rules; ready-made rule packs are optional. The product is not designed to examine a specific employee; the organisation decides what to do with the findings.
You narrow the scope by choosing a user group and a date range. You can try the rules on sample text before scanning (Test rules); the sample text is not saved anywhere.
Which chats and messages are scanned?
In Teams the scope is one-to-one chats; if the employee gave permission, only the messages that employee sent are scanned. Those messages may also contain personal data of the other person in the chat; the employee’s permission does not cover that person. Address this risk in your notice.
How is employee permission given?
No scan can run without the employee’s permission. Each employee gives their own permission through a personal link your organisation sends, carrying your logo and your text, in Turkish or English. In the product you can see:
- who has given permission,
- who is pending,
- whose permission is about to expire,
and resend in one step. Permission lapses after 90 days without use; the employee then has to give it again. Permission is given through the personal link, can be withdrawn by the employee, and the withdrawal is written to the audit log.
This permission does not replace your duty to inform employees and is not a legal ground. See FAQ 21 for details.
What do the results show?
By default the content is hidden; only the matching rule is shown. To see the full content, a duration, a reason and a ticket number are entered in Reveal; every view is written to the audit log. Access to the results depends on roles (Admin, Security Manager, Reporter) and should be limited to the fewest people necessary. Results, logs and the audit log stay in your own Azure storage.
Can an action in Teams be reversed?
No. In Exchange, OneDrive and Teams an action cannot be reversed; the product has no feature that reverses it. That is why an action is protected by modes, the hard action limit, roles and the audit log. Action modes stay off until an administrator turns them on; on a new installation only Safe Scan is possible.
How to start with a Safe Scan
- Prepare your notice and policy (see the before you scan list).
- Send employees the permission link; only those who give permission come into scope.
- Try the rules on sample text and narrow the scope.
- Run a Safe Scan: it only scans and reports, and touches nothing.
- Review the results; look at content only with a reason, through Reveal.
Short questions
Is anything outside one-to-one chats scanned? In the product’s description the Teams scope is one-to-one chats only; for any other scope, ask our technical team.
Are scans run in secret? No. No scan runs without the employee’s permission; scans are runs you start, in the periods announced in your notice to employees.
To see it live, request a demo. Related pages: How it works · OneDrive scanning · Security and data · FAQ.