Microsoft is changing how you record Teams meetings and teachers will need to know

On the 20th of August, Microsoft Teams will stop automatically storing recorded meeting videos in Microsoft Stream. Instead, users will have to manually download videos and upload videos to Stream if they want to keep them any longer than 21 days unless you upgrade them to a Microsoft 365 A3 license.

Currently, when anyone records a video meeting in Teams it’s automatically uploaded to Microsoft Stream and stored permanently in the background. Once implemented, this change will result in videos being stored in Teams for 21 days before being deleted, unless manually downloaded and shared with another service.

To retain the automatic upload feature schools can upgrade users to the Microsoft 365 A3 license, however, this comes at a significant additional cost and will be out of reach for many schools. The price for a Microsoft 365 A3 license at the time of writing is approximately £50 per staff member per year.

While unfortunate, the change is understandable. Permanently storing every single video, many of which will be rarely viewed, is untenable, and this move would appear to be a compromise between raising storage costs generally and retaining the option to store video long-term. It’s a hurdle designed to reduce the storage or unnecessary video files. During recent months it’s not unreasonable to assume that schools and businesses must have accumulated a huge amount of unviewed content.

This raises additional questions. In mixed licensing environments, where some users will have A1 licenses and others A3, how will this work?

According to a Microsoft Support Ambassador on their user voice forums, the licensing of the meeting organiser will always take precedent when recording video, regardless of who starts or ends the recording. If a user with the A1 license that organizes the meeting, the video will not be uploaded.

More details on the uploading Teams meetings can be found here and some useful guides for teachers can be found here.

While not a huge deal breaker, this does add an additional complication that teachers and students will need to be aware of when using Microsoft Teams.

For more information about using Microsoft Teams in education, take a look a our Microsoft Teams Teachers Hub.

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