14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced that end-to-end encryption is now generally available for one-to-one calls on Microsoft Teams, months after the feature was originally released for testing.
The public preview was shipped in October, and now Microsoft says that IT admins can enable and control this feature in their organizations after the feature is enabled for Microsoft Teams.
“As a reminder, by default end-to-end encryption will not be available to all users within the tenant. Once IT has configured the policy and enabled it for selected users, those selected users will still need to turn on end-to-end encryption in their Teams settings. IT retains the ability to disable E2EE for one-to-one Teams calls as necessary,” Microsoft explains.
Certain features not available
Available for the desktop client on Windows and Mac, the end-to-end call encryption makes it impossible to use certain features during the call, including the recording and the live caption and transcription.
Furthermore, Microsoft says call transfer, call park, call merge, and call companion are all features that wouldn’t be available when the end-to-end encryption is enabled within the app.
If you’re not sure if the encryption is enabled during a one-to-one call, just look for the indicator in the top left corner, as Microsoft has introduced a dedicated icon that shows up when the feature is active.
“With this release, users will see the encryption indicator on the Teams call window in the upper left corner. This indicator shows that the call is encrypted. Microsoft 365 encryption technologies encrypt every Teams call. If a call is successfully end-to-end encrypted, both parties will see the end-to-end encryption indicator on the Teams call window. The Teams end-to-end encryption indicator is a shield with a lock,” Microsoft explained when it rolled out the preview.
Microsoft recommends everybody to update to the latest version of the desktop client to get this feature.