Legal hold has launched for private channels in Microsoft Teams. Now I
haven't used private channels at all in our organization because we're an open
book, but I'm gonna try out private channels and see how this legal hold
feature works. So let's get started, make a little private channel in our team
called secret chats and I'm going to make it private. Next, and I'll add Blair.
Alright, done, secret chats between me and Blair. Let's have some secret chats. This
is a place for secret chats. Keep it secret, keep it safe. Ok so we've got our little secret
chat and they were gonna place this under legal hold and the place where we do
legal holds is under the advanced eDiscovery or the eDiscovery section in
the Security and Compliance Center. So we've logged in into the Security and
Compliance center here, we're going to go down to eDiscovery. we're making an advanced
eDiscovery case. We will make a new case: secret chats have gone too far.
Let's go to the home page use the default settings, ok, and then we'll click
on Holds, ok. So essentially what holds to do is they
preserve content in Microsoft 365. So users can still delete messages but then
those messages are still searchable via eDiscovery. So we'll create a case or
create a hold, secret chat hold. So when I first did this it didn't work because I
was looking for the channel messages that were stored in the team's group
mailbox but private messages in private channels are actually stored in each
user's own mailbox so instead of putting the legal hold on the actual group
mailbox we have to put the legal hold on the actual user mailboxes. In this
example we're just going to do the channel messages but it's a
different process for messages and files for private channels. So to perform an
eDiscovery search of content in a private channel you have to search across the
team, the site collection associated with the private channel, if you want to get
the team's files that were sent because when you make a private
channel it also makes an additional site collection to store those files, and the
mailboxes of private channel members to include messages. So in order to figure
out who those users are in the private channel there's a couple of ways that we
can do that. So we can do it by the Teams Admin Center.
So at portal.office.com we can go to admin here and we can go to show all
and we'll scroll down to Teams and then manage teams and then we will find the
team and we'll go to channels here and we'll go to channels and we will find
the secret chats channel and we'll see the members. So it should display who
those members are myself and Blair. Now the other way you're supposed to be able
to get teams channel members is via PowerShell, now I just tested these but
the version of the module that I had, even though I just installed it, doesn't
have the -membershiptype private parameter and there was no
Get-TeamChannelUser available for me so I won't demonstrate that because it didn't work
for me. So now that we've got those team's channel members, we're going to
apply a legal hold to those users which is myself Blair. So now I've added myself
and Blair to the secret chat hold and we'll save. So we've now selected the
users that are members of the private channel for the locations that we're
going to put the hold on, and we'll choose a query which is going to be
secret chats, save, so we're going to be putting a hold on all content that
matches that query which is secret chats. So now that we're under hold we'll
switch back to the secret chats private channel and I've posted a message that
says they're on to us we want to delete all secret chats, and we will delete
these messages, but even though we've deleted them we should still be able to
search them in eDiscovery. Then we'll switch back and we'll run a search and
we'll do a new search for that content.
Secret chat search, we won't do any custodians, we will do the users that are
in the private channel. Which is myself and Blair. We've now chosen myself and
Blair for the search, next. Search criteria, we're going to look for the key
word of secret chats and next. And we'll run that search. The search is completed
and we can see that it's found 10 items. Now this could include actual mailbox
content for these users, but we're really just interested in the the team's
channel messages. So I'm going to add the results to the review set. I'll make a
new, actually let's do a conversational review set. Secret chat conversations
Close, review sets, secret chat conversations. So our review set is now
available, let's have a look whether we can see our secret chats, and we can see
that those messages are there even though they've been deleted in the
channel. So that's how you apply a legal hold to a team's channels private
messages, and that feature has been marked as launched