LearnMicrosoft Teams › 12 · Compliance & records

eDiscovery of Teams content: artifact by artifact

'Search Teams' is not one search — every artifact type has a home, a search surface and a gap. The table below is the one your legal team should laminate.

The laminated table

Artifact Lives in Discoverable via Gap to know
1:1/group chat Participants' mailboxes (compliance copy) Mailbox scope per custodian Leavers need inactive mailboxes/holds
Channel messages Group mailbox Group/team scope Scope the TEAM, not members
Private channel messages Group scope (post-migration) + legacy member-mailbox history Both scopes for long windows The migration seam (channels module)
Meeting chat Participants' mailboxes As group chat Includes externals' messages held by YOUR side
Recordings OneDrive (recorder) / SPO (channel) SPO/OD locations Expiry timer may have deleted before the case (retention module)
Transcripts With the meeting artifacts Meeting artifacts search surfaces E2ee meetings never had one
Whiteboards Storage per whiteboard provisioning (OneDrive-based for new) File-side search Legacy boards' migration state varies
Files shared in chat Sender's OneDrive OD scope of the SHARER The link in chat is a pointer — collect the file, not the message
Loop components Loop storage (.loop files in OD/SPO) File-side A message quoting a Loop shows a snapshot-in-time question — collect both
Cards/bot posts Compliance records of the thread Message search Card ACTIONS (what the user clicked) live in the app's own logs, not Teams
Shared-channel content HOST tenant only Host's group scope Partners hold nothing (B2B module)

Practice notes

  • Custodian mapping is the real work: a matter's people -> their mailboxes + OneDrives + the TEAMS/groups they touched (Purview's custodian data-source mapping does Teams-aware expansion — use it rather than hand-listing).
  • Conversation reconstruction: modern review renders chat as threaded transcripts — export choices decide whether legal reads conversations or confetti.
  • Time zones and edit history: exports carry versions (message-lifecycle module) and UTC stamps — brief reviewers before they discover both mid-deposition.

What to watch (proofs)

  • A quarterly test search per artifact row: one known item of each type, searched and found — the table above verified against YOUR tenant, dated.
  • The seams: private-channel-era boundaries and recording-expiry settings (both in serv365's scanned/archived surfaces) — the two facts that most often falsify 'we have everything'.
  • Hold coverage vs matter list: holds in Purview against active matters — every matter with Teams-relevant custodians should show Teams-aware hold scopes.
  • Export integrity: item counts search-vs-export reconciled per collection — the gap you find in-house beats the gap opposing counsel finds.

PowerShell for this concept

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