What it does

Policy-based recording through a certified third-party recorder. A recording policy on the user (or a template on a call queue) invites the vendor's bot into every call or meeting, the bot takes the media via the Graph Communications APIs, and the recordings belong to the organisation rather than the participants.

Key facts

• The recorder is a certified partner's bot, running on Windows VMs in Azure, registered as an application instance (resource account). Recorder outbound needs the Azure public IP ranges; inbound needs the Teams ranges.
• User policy: New-CsTeamsComplianceRecordingPolicy, with the bot linked via New-CsTeamsComplianceRecordingApplication and PairedApplications. Strictness switches: RequiredBeforeCallEstablishment, RequiredDuringCall, RequiredBeforeMeetingJoin, RequiredDuringMeeting. ConcurrentInvitationCount controls how many recorder invites go out.
• Covers 1:1 and group calls, meetings, events, audio conferencing dial-in, PSTN calls and agent-answered call queue calls.
• Not covered: emergency calls, users in Survivable Branch Appliance mode, PSTN calls for India users. Not available in the China (21Vianet) cloud; available in the global service and the US Government L4/L5 clouds.
• Meetings are designed for up to 750 users in paired bot mode; above that, use town halls.
• Participants get a visual notice on Teams clients, phones and Rooms, and an audio notice on SIP phones, dial-in and PSTN callers. There's no consent mechanism — notification is enforced.
• Call queues: compliance recording is set by a Compliance Recording for Call Queue template (Voice > Templates and resources) and assigned on the queue's Templates step. Up to 2 templates per queue.
• Queue recording covers all agent-answered inbound queue calls and ignores agents' own recording policies for those calls. It needs conference mode.
• Queue templates have their own "Required before call" / "Required during call" toggles, an optional paired bot, and default greeting and failure announcements you can override per queue.
• Outbound calls by queue agents aren't recorded by the queue template — the agent needs a user policy for those.
• Only certified partners are supported by Microsoft. The Learn page lists them (ASC, CallCabinet, Dubber, NICE, Verint, Luware, Numonix, Theta Lake and others).

When to use / skip

Use it when there's a regulatory or contractual duty to capture everything — FCA-regulated trading and advice, MiFID II scope, debt collection, regulated healthcare lines — or when a contact centre needs QA recording on every agent call. Native Teams meeting recording and the newer automatic recording for call queues are convenience features that store to SharePoint/OneDrive and aren't built for evidential capture.

Skip it if the requirement is "it'd be nice to listen back". Automatic recording for call queues (template-based, SharePoint storage, no third-party bot) now covers basic QA, and compliance recording brings vendor licensing, Azure infrastructure and an availability dependency on every call.

Configuration decisions

• Which users and which queues are in scope. Recording everyone because it's simpler drags in personal calls and HR conversations.
• Strict vs non-strict. Strict (RequiredBeforeCallEstablishment/RequiredDuringCall) blocks or drops calls when the recorder isn't there — correct for regulated traders, risky for a general helpdesk.
• Resilience: paired bots and a second queue template. Microsoft suggests a concurrent invitation count of 2 for compliance-critical queues.
• Vendor hosting: their Azure tenancy or yours, and the storage region for recordings.
• Queue template vs user policy for agents: queue calls via the template, personal and outbound calls via a user policy. You'll usually need both.
• Announcement wording — the default queue greeting and failure messages are generic; legal will want to approve them.

Gotchas

• Strict policy plus recorder outage equals no calls. Agree with compliance in writing what should happen when the recorder is down.
• Queue templates are shared. Edit one and every queue using it changes.
• If an agent adds a second compliance-recorded queue into a call already being recorded, the second queue's settings are ignored.
• Teams Phone Mobile agents aren't recorded by queue compliance recording, and neither are Skype for Business clients. Check the device matrix before promising 100% capture.
• Teams Phone extensibility calls don't honour Teams compliance recording. If part of the estate moves to an ACS-based contact centre, it needs its own recording.
• SBA-mode survivability calls aren't recorded. That's a hole in the "everything" promise during WAN outages.

Consultant notes

• Get the scope as a written list of regulated user groups and queues, then map each to a policy or template. Auditors ask for exactly that list.
• Prove the failure behaviour in UAT: stop the bot and place calls. Clients are often surprised which calls drop.
• Recording policy assignment follows normal Teams policy precedence. Use group assignment so joiners in regulated teams are recorded from day one.
• Ask the vendor for their certification status and Microsoft support path, and confirm they're on the current certified list, not "in certification".
• Retention, search and eDiscovery live in the vendor's product, not Purview. Make sure records management knows where to look.

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Worth revisiting when Microsoft closes the queue-agent outbound gap — Learn says it's coming in a future release