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Microsoft Teams offers the ability to record meetings to allow participants to review the content later or share it with those who could not attend. This feature is particularly useful for remote work, training, and project management.
In this article, we will explain how this essential feature works, with a particular focus on how recordings function, where they are saved, and how to resolve some access permission issues.
How Meeting Recordings Work
To start a recording in Microsoft Teams, follow these steps:
- During a meeting, click on the three dots ("...") in the meeting control bar.
- Select Start recording and transcription.
- A notification will be displayed to all participants, informing them that the meeting is being recorded.
Where Are Recordings Saved?
Depending on the type of account and organization, recordings are saved in different locations:
- Microsoft OneDrive: If the meeting is among members of an organization, the default policy dictates that the recording will be saved in the "Recordings" folder of the user who organized the meeting (regardless of who started the recording).
- SharePoint: If the meeting is in a Teams channel, the recording will be stored in the team's document library in SharePoint.
Specifically, all the default paths for the various possible combinations are illustrated and explained in detail in this official Microsoft link.
These default locations can be modified if you have a premium MS Teams license. For example, if you want recordings to be saved in the "Recordings" folder of the user who started the recording instead of the meeting organizer, with MS Teams Premium, you can do this as follows:
- Access Teams Admin Center
- In the left menu, select Meetings > Meeting policies.
- Select the policy applied to users (e.g., Global if it is the default policy).
- Look for the option Meeting recordings storage.
- Ensure it is set to OneDrive for Business.
- Verify that the following options are correctly set:
- Allow participants to start recording: Enabled
- Save private call recordings to the recorder's OneDrive: Enabled
- Allow cloud recording: Enabled
Access and Sharing of Recordings
Once the meeting has ended, the recording will be available in the following ways:
- A link to the recording will be automatically shared in the meeting chat.
- Users who attended the meeting – and/or those with access permissions to the Team – can retrieve the recording from the shared recordings page of Microsoft 365, accessible at https://www.office.com/launch/Stream.
Downloading a Single Recording
By default, only the recording owner – the meeting organizer – can download the file and/or move it to another location. Other participants can only view and/or share it unless explicitly granted download access by the owner.
To enable a user to share and/or view a meeting, the owner must follow these steps:
- Open the stream page where the video is located.
- Click on the "Share" button (which is actually a menu) on the left.
- Select the "Manage access" option.
- Click on the "Grant access" icon (top right, next to "more options" and the classic "close" X).
- In the "Grant access" form that appears, enter the names of the users you want to share the meeting with and set the necessary permissions (edit, view, view without download), then click the "Grant access" button.
Unfortunately, this procedure must be performed for each individual video. As of now, it is not possible to grant these permissions globally for a team, channel, or organization unless you have a premium MS Teams license and modify the default recording policies (as explained earlier).
Granting Download Access to All Recordings
If you do not have a Teams Premium license, the only way to allow a user other than the meeting organizer to download all past, present, and future recordings (without having to intervene on each file) is to ask the meeting owner to follow these steps:
- Access SharePoint.
- Go to the Recordings folder, where videos of meetings organized by the user as the owner are automatically stored.
- Grant edit or view access to the users you want to allow downloading of the recordings, modifying the default setting (which only allows viewing without download).
This way, all videos in the /Recordings/ folder, as well as those related to all future recordings, will be accessible to the specified users. However, the downside of this workaround is that these users will have access to ALL files in the /Recordings/ folder of that user, including potentially confidential recordings. It is therefore strongly recommended to avoid this practice unless the user is absolutely certain about sharing every recording made through MS Teams within meetings they organized with the specified users.
To mitigate this issue, it is advisable to create one or more /Shared/ folders within the /Recordings/ folder and share those, manually moving the files you wish to share with specific users and/or groups. At that point, simply copying (moving is not sufficient) the files to be shared from /Recordings/ to /Recordings/Shared/ will allow the specified users to download and/or manage them (depending on the assigned permissions).
Workaround: Changing the Meeting Owner
To facilitate the management of recordings and ensure that the person who starts the recording can manage it independently without issues, the best workaround with the non-premium version of MS Teams is to make sure that the meeting organizer and the person who starts the recording are the same. This way, the recording will be stored in the personal SharePoint folder of the user who started the meeting, allowing them to rename, download, move, delete, etc.
Conclusion
Microsoft Teams meeting recordings are a powerful tool for collaboration and business information management. With proper permission management and retention policies, they can enhance productivity and communication within work teams.
