Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Configuring Zero Hour Auto Purge (ZAP) for Teams through PowerShell now in Preview

Ok, first things first - congratulations to all the Microsoft MVP's who were renewed this week! It was awesome to see so many friends, and so many passionate community members earn the award after their incredible efforts last year. Blogging. Speaking. Feeding back to product teams. Sharing code. Running events. Staffing events. Writing books. Even social media. You name it. Jeff Teper - CVP of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams often refers to them at events and on social as being part of 'The Best Community in Tech'. It's something I would have to agree upon having known many of them now for some time. So congrats again MVP's! And with that out the way for another year let's move onto the blog which is a shorter one this week, and a direct follow up from a recent blog on ZAP within the new Collaborative Security for Microsoft Teams. Now only last month I recommended sticking with the security presets given that since it came out in March there didn't appear to be a seperate ZAP policy for Teams and that the settings for Exchange Online and Teams appeared to be bound together. But in a recent message issued through the Message Centre this week, it was announced that Microsoft is 'adding new Teams Protection cmdlets to control ZAP for Teams'. Moreso, 'Going forward, please utilise the new cmdlets to control ZAP and quarantine policies for Microsoft Teams'. So the good news all up is that management starts becoming more granular, and you can have different ZAP policies for Exchange Online and Teams if and should you need them. On the other hand it's likely going to raise a few questions such as - if the policies are set in PowerShell moving forward will they then surface in the Microsoft 365 Defender Portal and the security presets? And if they are set in PowerShell, will changes in the Microsoft 365 Defender Portal overwrite? Whilst this blog is an awareness piece regarding the cmdlets and serves as an addendum to the previous blog given personal testing, I would actively encourage admins to go on and test further. Being in preview and with so much evolving so quickly it's fair to state that we don't ultimately know the destination or the final intended behaviours and user experience as it isn't confirmed beyond these cmdlets. Whilst I would wager that there will be a change in the GUI so that ZAP policies for Exchange Online and Teams are distinct and explicit, and that you will see the specific Teams Protection policies on quarantined items, and everything will fit flush within the presets, well you just never know, or when that's going to land. So let's look at something that has a load of caveats on, but at the same time will be central to how ZAP for Teams is managed moving forward.