DISCO has released its newest Chat Streams datatype support, Microsoft Teams. This feature identifies Teams data contained within a PST during the Native Ingest process. We leverage the same Chat capabilities introduced with Slack, along with the addition of a Chat Source field to differentiate Chat formats.
Ingesting Microsoft Teams PST data in DISCO
Processing Microsoft Teams data as Chat only requires that the data is in PST format and that you use our already-existing native ingest via our high-speed uploader. Simply select "New ingest", then "Native high-speed uploader” from the "Native" option in the “My computer” category.
You’ll step through the ingest process with the same steps you’re used to today and DISCO will automatically identify any Teams content within a PST and group it into 24-hour Chat documents per PST. DISCO's Microsoft Teams feature supports only Teams data stored within PSTs - We will not support Teams data that has been exported in MSG format.
How is information broken up into documents? And what relationships are applied between documents?
The processing of your documents will appear to occur much the same as any other ingest into DISCO. As MSG files are being processed from the PST, they are examined for Teams indicators and routed to be processed as Chat documents.
Each chat document in DISCO represents a single calendar day of messages from a single channel or set of direct (or group) messages. That calendar day begins at midnight of the time zone to which your DISCO database was set. This means that the starting time and ending time of each chat document properly aligns with the times the emails in your database were normalized at, providing consistency within your database.
In the above example, there is a chat document containing messages from a channel on March 9. The channel's main messages on March 9 began at 4:27pm, and ended at 4:31pm. However, people also made threaded replies to some of those messages. On April 6, a threaded reply was posted at 7:49am to a message from March 9, creating the first Teams thread (that document also has a file attached to it, and has one DISCO tag applied to it, as shown with the paperclip and the tag icons). That same thread then continued on April 14, and again on June 21.
Next, a different message from March 9 was replied to on June 13, creating a second Teams thread.
Finally, on March 16, a new message was sent in the main channel area at 2:34pm.
Teams Channel threads can be understood with the help of the indentation levels displayed in DISCO's conversation browser. The messages in the primary channel level are all at one indentation level. Any threads created by someone replying to those messages will receive an additional indent for the first document in that thread. This is as deep as the indentation levels can go, because Teams does not allow someone to create thread replies within another thread reply.
Tip: Each entire channel, or set of DMs, or set of group DMs is associated using DISCO's conversation grouping mechanism (the same as with a chain of emails). This means that if you locate a document of interest, and want to include its entire channel of messages in a folder, review stage, etc., then you can use the "apply changes to related documents" functionality throughout DISCO for the "conversation" of documents. You can also sort the chat documents by their conversation ID or by their conversation date.
Purview Export Settings
Purview offers several methods for handling Teams data when generating an export. To ensure that data is exported in a format that this feature can process, the following settings need to be selected:
In the “Messages and related items from mailboxes and Exchange online” section, ensure that you’ve selected “Include Teams and Viva Engage conversations”, especially when using any search terms to limit your collection scope.
Additionally, ensure that “Organize conversations into HTML transcript” is disabled - this feature generates HTML data for Teams instead of PST. Note that if this feature is enabled DISCO will still be able to process the resulting HTML files, but we will not recognize it as being Teams chat information
In the “Export format” section, ensure that you have selected “Create .PSTs for messages where possible”. DISCO does not support .msg Teams data at this time.
In the "Package size settings", we also recommend using the maximum PST package size (currently 10 GB) as Teams data is combined on a per-PST basis.
Deduplication
DISCO's Chat Streams for Microsoft Teams includes a set of advanced deduplication features. These features are designed to help prevent conversations from appearing in your database more than once.
Each channel or set of direct messages only appears once, and attachments appear in the context of their messages.
New Metadata Field
Microsoft Teams data will populate the existing Chat metadata fields, as well as the newly introduced “Chat source” field. This field will help you distinguish between the different types of Chat data that you’ve ingested into DISCO. In addition, this field can be utilized in load file ingests and overlays.
Exporting and Producing
Natives
The Chat document which DISCO builds for Teams data is a collection of information from the Teams messages present within the PST. These are interpreted, combined, and sliced to create each channel's day's document of messages.
As such, if you select to download or produce the native version for a chat document in DISCO, the native version is simply a copy of the near-native PDF.
Metadata
The new Chat Source field is available to be added into your metadata DAT file in your Production.