Microsoft Teams: Personal message reminders for chat and channels

🚨 The Signal: Teams is adding personal message reminders, allowing users to flag messages for follow-up. This feature is user-controlled, private, and enabled by default, with no admin controls, potentially increasing data sprawl and reducing visibility.

The Impact

All Teams users are affected by a new feature that could subtly increase data sprawl and reduce central visibility for compliance and eDiscovery.

• End users: Can create personal reminders, potentially storing sensitive context outside of managed data flows.
• Security team: Reduced visibility into user-flagged content, complicating data loss prevention and eDiscovery.
• Compliance team: New data points for reminders may fall outside existing retention policies, increasing compliance risk.
• IT administrators: No direct controls to manage or audit this new user-generated content.

The Action

1. Review existing data retention and eDiscovery policies to determine if 'reminders' content falls within scope.
2. Communicate to users that personal reminders are not a substitute for official record-keeping or task management systems.
3. Monitor Microsoft Purview for future enhancements that may provide governance controls over Teams reminders.
4. Assess the potential for sensitive information to be inadvertently stored in personal reminders, outside of DLP policies.

Domain: Teams · Impact: medium · Workload: Teams