Action required: Upcoming changes to how Vault handles group conversations

Time sensitive announcement

In December 2020, Google Chat will change how group conversations work. Building on the recent release of unthreaded rooms, group conversations in Chat will be handled like unnamed, unthreaded rooms. For clarity, Chat will now consider all threaded rooms, unthreaded rooms, and group conversations as "Chat spaces". In Vault, references to "rooms" will change to "Chat spaces". For organizations that still have classic turned on, groups conversations will be synchronized to Chat. Retention rules, holds, and search will be applied to group messages as described in the following sections.

Who's impacted, what to do, and when

If your organization has done any of the following in Vault, evaluate your settings and policies to ensure that they work as required by your organization:

Set custom retention rules for Chat
Placed holds on Chat messages
Saved queries that search Gmail or Chat

The next section has details about what's changing. The changes will roll out to customers over several weeks in December.

What's changing

Retention

Currently, group conversations are handled as direct messages (DMs) with many recipients and are subject to retention rules set for organizational units.

With the upcoming release, new group conversations in Chat will be handled like unthreaded rooms. Unlike current group conversations, the members of a group chat can be added or removed. When Vault users set a Chat custom retention rule, they'll set it for an organizational unit or "all Chat spaces" (instead of "all Rooms"). An "all Chat spaces" retention rule will apply to these new group conversations.

The following table lists which message types are retained by each type of rule:

Organizational unit-based retention rule	"All Chat spaces" retention rule
DMs in Chat Group conversations in Chat created before early December 2020	Threaded spaces (spaces with messages in conversations) Unthreaded spaces (spaces with messages in a single thread, like DMs) Group conversations in Chat created after early December 2020

Existing rules that were set for "all rooms" will become "all Chat spaces" and apply to new group conversations in Chat.

Holds

Currently, when a Vault user sets a hold on Chat, the hold applies to DMs and group messages associated with the specified accounts or accounts in the specified organizational unit. The Vault user can check a box to include messages in rooms.

With the upcoming release, the checkbox will apply to messages in Chat spaces, as defined in the preceding table.

Search, preview, and export

Currently, to search group messages in Chat, you search by specific accounts or by an organizational unit. History must be turned on for messages to be available to Vault.

With the upcoming release:

To include messages in these new group conversations in a Chat account-based search, Vault users must check the Include messages from Chat spaces box (formerly the Include messages from rooms box). This option makes Vault search all threaded rooms and unthreaded rooms that the accounts are members of, including new group conversations (as long as history is on).
To search for messages in new group conversations in a Chat spaces-based search, Vault users will enter a member of the group chat and then select from a list of Chat spaces. The search will return messages from selected new group conversations.
To provide context for messages that match your Chat search query, preview and export return all messages in the group chat sent 12 hours before and 12 hours after the matched message.

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