Ms Teams

Background. MS Teams is an evolution and unification of several Microsoft products (or acquisitions) that have been around for some time. · Public Records Act ...

It does appear that once you get the permissions set in SharePoint, it carries over to the version shared in Teams. This requires the owner of the document to open the record in SharePoint and alter the settings, which is fairly complicated and hard to implement as a regular practice. There are settings that the creator of a channel can turn on that limit some or particular users’ ability to respond to or create new posts within a channel. It is perfectly ok for a quorum of the body to view a document. The first is that certain users can be invited into MS Teams as “guests.” If your governing body members are only “guests,” there are certain limitations on what they can do, but they are not limited in their communication participation. This is a good example where you would need to combine the tool with a policy of not using the “reaction” emojis to avoid a quorum from indicating their position on an issue. The big concern when it comes to communication platforms is that the members will inadvertently engage in a serial meeting in violation of the OPMA. Just like text messages and emails, governing body members need to be careful that a quorum of the governing body is not discussing agency business over chat. The first is to have policies in place that folks are expected to comply with even if there are no functional guardrails in place to keep them on the straight and narrow path. We use Microsoft Content Search and the new Compliance Manager tool to search the chats and posts. The public records officer may still need to go to the organization’s officers and employees to have them identify whether MS Teams files or chat records are responsive to a specific request. We had previously addressed some issues in these online resources: [MRSC - Public Records Considerations in the Era of Telecommuting](https://mrsc.org/Home/Stay-Informed/MRSC-Insight/April-2020-1/Public-Records-Considerations-in-the-Era-of-Teleco.aspx) [What Constitutes a Serial Meeting under the OPMA?](https://mrsc.org/Home/Stay-Informed/MRSC-Insight/November-2020-1/What-Is-a-Serial-Meeting-under-the-OPMA.aspx)