Improved recording solutions for MS Teams

Recording has always been a valuable feature in the communication landscape. Required by businesses for a range of different reasons, from compliance to process improvements, recording offers essential access to information. As the need for recording solutions continues to expand, vendors like Microsoft have begun engaging with various recording companies to provide integrations available throughout 2020.

Similarly, Cisco recently purchased the Voicea brand, aiming to use the company’s powerful transcription service to bring the benefits of text to voice communications. AGAT Software, one of the market leaders in the delivery of security and compliance solutions for UC and collaboration services, has begun to deliver its own offering in this market. The AGAT flagship product, SphereShield, now works with Microsoft Teams to offer exceptional recording solutions, without the need for a third-party recording service. The SphereShield offering will also soon be available for Cisco Webex Meetings and Zoom.

I spoke with CEO for AGAT Software, Yoav Crombie, to find out more.

Tell us About the New Solution

SphereShield is AGAT’s solution for security, compliance and functionality within the communication and collaboration environment. According to Yoav, the idea for this new solution came from a number of things. First, customers were discussing the need for a new and improved recording solution to serve their compliance and information management needs.

Additionally, at Microsoft Ignite, AGAT Software realised that Microsoft is now working with 6 different vendors on some kind of integration for call recording. “While the need for call recording has been around for a long time, we have mainly focused on files, messaging, and communication in general. However, Microsoft Ignite showed us just how valuable this opportunity could be.”

AGAT believes that it can offer something that’s very efficient and cost-effective to its customers. “It’s easy for us to deliver this recording service, because we already have the building blocks in place. We have the Graph API and Proxy capabilities.” What’s more, call recording is becoming increasingly more valuable as the functionality continues to improve.

Tell Us About What You’ve Done with SphereShield

SphereShield, AGAT Software’s leading solution for compliance and security, will now offer a cost-effective solution that integrates with the Microsoft Stream server.

“The solution has several layers, addressing the needs of the current marketplace”

One of the main issues that people have with Microsoft Teams recording, is that you can’t share the recorded conversations externally. If you have recorded a meeting with external users, you can’t send that recording to the meeting participants. SphereShield will overcome that issue by creating a shareable link for the video. Additionally, SphereShield will also be adding video eDiscovery into the service, allowing people to search for the information that they need by parameters like dates, participants, meeting title, and meeting content. The eDiscovery is designed to be used by an end user rather than an admin.

“The other thing that we’re going to unlock is the ability to create a transcript for the meeting that you’ve done. We’re using the Microsoft solution for this and enhancing it. There are 8 languages supported, and you can use the transcript to analyse keywords, labels, and topics, using AI linguistic analysis. There’s also the option to analyse recordings and detect DLP incidents with the SphereShield built-in engine.”

What Other Compliance Features Are There?

The SphereShield solution for Microsoft Teams addresses a number of the issues that came from customers, including the need to store recordings on-prem. “Our customers were telling us that they needed to disable recording in Teams because they need recording to be stored on-prem. SphereShield allows for storing the recordings in a location under company control.”

SphereShield users can also enforce recording policies that force recording with specific business rules based on users, AD groups, domains and external participant information. Policy can also control whether users will be able to record or not. “We’ll also be offering the ability to analyse audio conversations in real-time and take action when incidents of DLP are detected. You can deliver action in the form of a popup awareness notification, or you can end the call.

The audio is streamed and inspected in real-time with the DLP solution, making it easy to educate the user about any security problems.

AGAT is also Working with Cisco

The AGAT Software team will also be bringing the solution for Microsoft Teams into the Cisco Webex Meeting solutions too. Using APIs, users will be able to analyse meeting recordings using similar recording and compliance options, as well as eDiscovery. AGAT is working with Cisco to release a solution that will offer archiving, analysis and DLP inspection of meeting recordings.

Additionally, now that Cisco has purchased Voicea, the company will be able to create a solution that offers live transcriptions and real-time content inspection in the future. SphereShield will be offering the ability to get all meeting recordings and transcribe the audio using DLP policies, for the detection of incidents with compliance. “We’re planning on working with Zoom, too.”

Ultimately, with the AGAT Software SphereShield solution, companies using Microsoft Teams will be able to take advantages of the recording features built-into their system. Instead of using a third-party recording solution, you can use SphereShield to access greater compliance and functionality.

“Plus, it’s a much faster and more flexible solution. You can implement this today as an on-prem or SaaS offering. That’s another major advantage over some of the vendors out there”

Original Source: https://www.uctoday.com/collaboration/team-collaboration/agat-software-enhances-recording-for-microsoft-teams/