When hosting an important presentation, training session, or cross-departmental alignment call in Microsoft Teams, not everyone will be able to attend live. To ensure absent team members do not miss critical information, you should record the meeting. Recording a Teams call captures all audio, video feeds, and any screen-sharing activities, automatically saving the final MP4 file to your organization’s Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint for easy distribution.
How to Start Recording a Meeting
To record a meeting, you must either be the meeting organizer or a participant with presenting privileges within the same organization. Guests and external attendees cannot initiate a recording.
- Join or start your Microsoft Teams meeting as you normally would.
- Once you are in the active call window, look at the main control toolbar at the top of the screen.
- Click on the More button (represented by a three-dot icon:
...). - From the drop-down menu, scroll down to the “Record and transcribe” section.
- Click on Start recording.
A red dot will appear in the top-left corner of the meeting window for all participants, and Teams will display a banner notifying everyone that they are being recorded. This is a strict privacy requirement.
How to Stop and Find the Recording
The recording will automatically stop if every single person leaves the meeting. However, if you want to stop the recording early while the meeting continues, you must do so manually.
- Click the More (
...) button on the top toolbar again. - Select Stop recording from the menu.
- A confirmation box will pop up. Click Stop recording again to confirm.
Once the meeting ends or you manually stop the capture, Microsoft Teams will begin processing the video in the cloud. This can take several minutes depending on the length of the call.
Where to find the file:
If it was a standard calendar meeting, the video file will be automatically saved to the OneDrive of the person who clicked “Start recording,” specifically in a folder named Recordings. Additionally, a direct link to play the video will appear in the meeting’s chat history, allowing all invited participants to click and watch it immediately without having to request file access.