Changes to archiving of Google Chat data

What is changing?

Currently, the CloudM Platform allows customers who have purchased CloudM Archive to automate the offboarding of users' data into cloud storage for archival. User data including emails, chat history and drive files can be archived.

Google Chat was based on Google Hangout technology, and Google have announced that they are migrating Workspace customers to their new Google Chat technology. 

For more details on the transition, please see the article below:

https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangouts-and-upgrade-google-chat/

Unfortunately, 3rd party applications like CloudM Archive have not been given access to an API to access messages for users based on the new Google Chat platform, and, therefore, it’s not possible for us to archive this chat data anymore.

When will messages stop being archived for a user?

We do not plan on removing the Archive Chat option for users. Instead, information will be added to explain when chat content can and can’t be archived. Any chat messages for a user that are available via Google Hangouts will still be archived as they are now.

There are a few scenarios to understand: 

• Google Workspaces that have never had chat based on Google Hangouts - Google workspace domains created after mid-2020 would not have had the chat feature based on Google Hangouts. Therefore, no historic user chats can be archived.
• Google Workspaces that are currently based on Google Hangouts - Chat messages will continue to be archived until that Workspace is migrated to Chat from Hangouts. Google plans to complete this in early 2022.
• Google Workspace that have been migrated from Google Hangouts to Google Spaces - Only historic messages that are available via the Google Gmail API will be archived. This will depend on when Google migrated the domain away from Google Hangouts to use Google Chat exclusively. As this was a Google migration, CloudM cannot provide information on when this change occurred.

Will this impact on chat conversations that have already been archived?

No. Any chats that have already been archived for a given user will remain in the cloud storage configured along with the retention policy for that data, as defined by the customer. Therefore, chat data will still be purged in accordance to data retention regulations.