Demystifying a User Compliance setting in Skype for Business Online

I recently had to figure out a Skype for Business (SfB) Online user settings in the O365 Admin Center that was poorly understood – the user setting “For compliance, turn off non-archived features” as shown here:

The purpose of this setting is to allow Administrators to turn off SfB online communication features that cannot have the communication content captured by the in-place hold feature that is used with Exchange integration (the in-place hold is an Exchange feature configured in the Exchange admin center which allows archiving of communication to a special folder in the corresponding Exchange for compliance purposes).

This setting turns off the SfB features that cannot be subject to the in-place hold. Enterprises that are required to preserve digital communication can turn this setting on to ensure all SfB communication can be captured with the in-place holder features.

The SfB online features which are turned off are:

• File transfer using instant messaging

• Shared OneNote pages

• PowerPoint annotations

SfB Online accomplishes this by setting the Conferencing Policy for the user to one that does that include the above features.

The default Conferencing Policy is BposSAllModality. After turning this setting on for a user, the Conferencing policy is set to BposSAllModalityNoFT – notice the “NoFT” in the name = “No File Transfer”.

We can see the exactly settings in each conferencing policy using these two cmdlet:

Get-CsConferencingPolicy -Identity BposSAllModality,

Get-CsConferencingPolicy -Identity BposSAllModalityNoFT

Here are the settings for the BposSAllModality:

• AllowSharedNotes                              : True
• EnableFileTransfer                              : True
• EnableP2PFileTransfer                         : True
• DisablePowerPointAnnotations              : False

Here are the settings for the BposSAllModalityNoFT:

• AllowSharedNotes                              : False
• EnableFileTransfer                              : False
• EnableP2PFileTransfer                         : False
• DisablePowerPointAnnotations              : True

Here is the SfB Online PowerShell cmdlet to change all users to use a specific policy (in this case the BposSAllModality policy):

Get-CsOnlineUser | Grant-CsConferencingPolicy -PolicyName BposSAllModality

Here is the SfB Online PowerShell cmdlet to set a specific user to have a policy (in this case the BposSAllModalityNoFT policy):

Grant-CsConferencingPolicy -identity curtisj@example.com -PolicyName bposSAllModalityNoFT