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Separate Teams Policies Govern Recording and Transcription from February 2025
In a sensible decision announced in two Microsoft 365 message center posts on 3 January 2025, Microsoft plans to use separate Teams recording and transcription policies for meeting and events. Until now, the same org-wide meeting policy governed both kinds of gatherings. From late February 2025, all forms of meetings will use the current meeting policy while events will use settings in the Teams event policy. Separate settings are available to control recording and transcription in webinar and town hall events.
The relevant message center posts are MC971032 (recording) Microsoft 365 roadmap item 473887, and MC971031 (transcription), Microsoft 365 roadmap item 473886.
Managing Teams Recording and Transcription Policies
The settings for Teams recording and transcription policies can be managed through the Teams admin center (Figure 1) or with PowerShell. The settings dictate whether meeting organizers can record and transcribe their events.
The new recording and transcription settings are not currently available in the Teams admin center. In the interim, you can use PowerShell to update the default Teams event policy or configure new Teams event policies. For example, this example of using the Get-CsTeamsEventsPolicy cmdlet finds all Teams event policies in the tenant and outputs the value of the settings used to control recording and transcription for town hall and webinar events:
Get-CsTeamsEventsPolicy | Format-Table Identity, RecordingForTownhall, TranscriptionForTownHall, RecordingForWebinar, TranscriptionForWebinar -AutoSize Identity RecordingForTownhall TranscriptionForTownhall RecordingForWebinar TranscriptionForWebinar -------- -------------------- ------------------------ ------------------- ----------------------- Global Enabled Enabled Enabled Enabled Tag:WebinarOrganizers Enabled Enabled Enabled Enabled
The values shown above are the default. To disable a setting, run the Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy cmdlet. For example:
Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -Identity Global -RecordingForTownHall Disabled
When updating Teams event policies, make sure that you use a current version of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module (I used V6.7 for the commands shown above).
Transcription Default Setting Changing to On
There’s no doubt that meeting transcriptions are very useful, even if you don’t have Microsoft 365 Copilot or Teams Premium licenses to generate intelligent recaps from transcripts.
Reflecting the value of transcripts, Microsoft will introduce another change in February 2025 to enable transcripts for meetings as the default (currently, the setting is disabled). The change will apply to new tenants and any existing tenants if they don’t have customized meeting policies. In other words, if you have an existing Microsoft 365 tenant and have never changed the meeting policy, the transcription setting shown in Figure 1 will change from Off to On.
The update is documented in message center post MC973519 (7 January 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 468282). Microsoft says that the change to the default transcription setting will make it consistent with the recording setting and notes that the change “is designed to streamline the adoption of transcription and enhance the use of all AI features.” There’s no point in having premium functionality ready to process transcripts if transcription is disabled.
Face and Voice Enrollment
Another change in this area is documented in MC912707 (updated 20 December 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 413708), which governs voice and face profile enrolment for meetings held in rooms equipped with Teams Rooms devices. Microsoft plans to enable voice and face profile enrolment by default from mid-February 2025.
The problem that Microsoft is trying to solve is to differentiate between individuals in a meeting room so that contributions can be correctly attributed to the right person in the transcript. By enrolling their voice and face profile, users make it easier for Teams to identify them using technologies like facial and vocal recognition. See the Microsoft documentation for more information.
Some organizations aren’t too keen on users enrolling voice and face profiles. If you’re in this situation, you can disable enrolment using the Set-CsTeamsAIPolicy cmdlet. The default values are revealed with Get-CsTeamsAIPolicy:
Get-CsTeamsAIPolicy Identity EnrollFace EnrollVoice -------- ---------- ----------- Global Enabled Enabled
To disable the settings and prevent users enrolling a profile, run:
Set-CsTeamsAIPolicy -Identity Global -EnrollFace Disabled -EnrollVoice Disabled
Many Changes Around Transcription
Microsoft has been busy around meeting transcription over the last year. The activity has included moving Teams transcripts to OneDrive to make storage consistent and imposing tighter control over transcripts. Both steps were necessary predecessors before making meeting transcription the default. Not everyone will love the changes Microsoft is making to make transcription more pervasive and accurate. It’s your tenant, so take charge and decide what policy defaults you think are best to use.
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Hi, as a non-english speaking organisation we would prefer to be able to manually enable a transcription. As is, when you press record, the transcription starts automatically. In most cases this is redundant and not useful (as the quality of dutch text recognition is not that good). If you disable transcriptions, nobody can manually start one. Do you know a way to configure this so that a transcription is ‘on demand’?
Not with the current setup. As you point out, the options to control transcriptions give people the ability to generate a transcript automatically when recording starts or disable the facility. I don’t know of an interim method. But you should report the issues with Dutch transcription to Microsoft Belgium to see what they say.