Now Microsoft launches new Teams feature that permits recordings in Teams to be automatically deleted from SharePoint or OneDrive after a predetermined period.

The US tech giant announced the feature in December updates for the platform, which included end-to-end call encryption and a fix for a bug that caused some devices to freeze after an emergency call.

Auto-expiration, which will be on by default, can be disabled by admins. A new recording will expire automatically after 60 days of recording if no action is taken. Microsoft said in a blog post that it accelerated the rollout "because of overwhelming customer requests".

"All newly created Teams meeting recordings (TMRs) will have a default expiration date of 60 days."

Microsoft stated in a support document.

All tenants have this enabled by default. Accordingly, all TMRs created after this feature was enabled will be deleted 60 days after their creation date."

Meetings will also be able to be set to never expire in the admin center or via PowerShell commands. The feature was described by Microsoft as a "lightweight housekeeping mechanism". The average hour of recording uses about 400MB of cloud storage. According to Microsoft, 99% of recordings are not watched after 60 days.

According to Microsoft, nearly all customers will benefit from the reduced storage load on their tenant by removing recordings that are unlikely to be watched again after 60 days, according to the support document.

"Our goal is to provide a clean experience to all customers by default."

In SharePoint or OneDrive, end users can also modify the expiration date for recordings they have permission to edit/delete from the file details pane.

The feature will not affect meeting recordings stored in Microsoft Stream, but it will affect recordings in the new Stream built on SharePoint and OneDrive.

Microsoft said the feature was also only available for recordings created by the Teams service in SharePoint and OneDrive and not for other types of files.