Yesterday, Microsoft announced that over the next 6 weeks or so they will be rolling out the ability to apply Retention Polices to Private Channels. This has been a missing gap in the breadth of the Microsoft 365 retention capabilities since Private Channels were first released and is a great new feature to see being introduced.
The approach that Microsoft has opted for is, however, rather strange. Unlike standard Teams Channel Posts, where the Retention Policy is associated with the given Team, for Private Channels it is associated with each user. This means that posts made by different users in a Private Channel could in theory be subject to different retention rules (something that cannot happen in standard Channels).
This also means that if a Post is deleted in a Private Channel it will be retained in Exchange within the user’s mailbox (whereas if a Post is deleted in a standard Channel it is retained in the Microsoft 365 Group mailbox).
While I strongly welcome this new feature and it certainly helps to close a gap, it adds another quirk to the already confusing story of retention in Microsoft 365.
More information about this capability can be found by searching for MC263844 in your tenant’s Message center, or by searching for the associated Microsoft 365 Roadmap item: 70582.