Acorn’s CEO, Lia Majid, and Business Development Manager, Zef Deda joined the 2021 InfoGov World Expo & Conference alongside 100+ expert speakers across major facets of IG, from Data Governance, Privacy & Data Protection, eDiscovery, etc. The Acorn team joined this conversation through their session, ‘The Next Generation of Piece Mail: Where Does Microsoft Teams fit into Information Governance?’, which explored the new information governance challenges related to the increasing use of Microsoft Teams throughout organizations and firms.

It’s no secret that over the past year, Microsoft Teams has rapidly increased in popularity due to many organizations switching to remote work during the pandemic. With this increase in Teams communications, organizations are faced with new challenges related to modern attachments, information governance considerations, handling ESI protocols, collections, and review and production.

A key point Acorn’s Chief Executive Officer emphasized during the session was that Teams data is disparate. She explained that Teams files are stored in one area of SharePoint for one-on-one conversations and another area of SharePoint for group conversations. Oftentimes, when completing collections and reviews, attachments shared in Teams will not easily carry over during eDiscovery. This can cause issues as trying to review documents that are stuck in the backend can be very difficult, especially if we aren’t aware they exist.

Lia explained that in order to collect one-on-one Teams messages, you need to have a certain level of subscription to allow you to access the data. If you’re not managing your Teams data proactively, then you’ll have discoverable information that can be costly to access through Microsoft. Not to mention, it’s not possible to extract one-on-one Teams data without having access to Microsoft’s Protected API, and you can’t currently collect team by team.

This is something to consider in terms of Information Governance, because if you need to remove data, you need to have policies oriented to these new types of communications in place to enforce this. For instance, if any employee were to leave your organization, you need to determine whether to leave their account as active for a period of time and for how long, so you can still access their Teams data.  

Due to these challenges, Lia and Zef suggested one of the ways to address these challenges is leveraging new technologies, such as Relativity Collect. Collect has an easy wizard that lets you access all these disparate sources in one centralized environment, following these steps

1. Set up the collection job
2. Choose the custodians
3. Choose the types of data you want to collect
4. Choose the workspace
5. Publish the collected data to a processing workspace

Along with being cloud based, keeping your data more secure, its direct integration with Microsoft Teams makes this an ideal way to collect data. Once collected, the Relativity’s RSMF will allow you to review the Teams conversation the same way in RelativityOne as they would appear in the Teams platform.

As with any new challenge, we are continually identifying and addressing the best practices and procedures in which to stay one step ahead. As Teams has now become foundational in organizations and firms, now is the time to face these challenges and start the discussions on how you and your team can handle them and what steps you need to take to do so.