Hi, we are managing a number of teams and one or more teams have commuincated that they need to enable a retention policy due to GDPR concerns. How will this affect users who are members of both teams with an active retention policy and teams without? And also, how do retention policy work for direct conversations between members of different teams? Will retention policies generally affect direct conversations at all?
Thank you for raising these excellent questions, Frode! Retention policies apply at the team or channel level and can also be configured for direct messages; you can find detailed guidance on how they work in our Retention Policy documentation. Please feel free to ask if you need further clarification!
I see, I’m still having trouble nailing this down. Say user A from Team X has a retention policy through a policy on the team level, he’s chatting with user B from Team Y with no such policy. How will this affect direct messages between user A and B? Will just the messages from user A be deleted or both? Also, how would we go about hard deleting soft deleted posts? Will we have to create custom SQL jobs? There doesn’t seem to be any way of doing this natively..
Thank you for your time!
Great follow-up questions, Frode! For direct messages between users in different teams, the retention policy of the initiating user’s team typically takes precedence for those messages. In your example, if a retention policy applies to User A’s team, it would impact the direct messages between User A and User B, regardless of User B’s team policies. Regarding the hard deletion of soft-deleted posts, Mattermost does not currently provide a native way to manage this, so custom SQL queries are indeed the common approach.