Integrate Chat with a third-party archiving solution

Supported editions for this feature: Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus; Education Fundamentals and Education Plus. Compare your edition

As an administrator, you can set up a third-party solution to archive Google Chat messages as email journal archives. This solution can be useful to:

• Comply with electronic storage requirements, such as SEC Rule 17a-4
• Continue using a third-party archiving solution

How integration works

To integrate Chat with a third-party archiving solution, specify an email address where journal messages are forwarded.

• Archiving begins when at least one person in the 1:1 direct message, group chat, or space has archiving enabled.
  Note: Only messages from spaces owned by your organization are archived. Messages from spaces owned by external users are not archived.
• Archiving ends up to 3 days after the last user with archiving enabled leaves the group chat or space. Messages in the chat sent after this time aren't archived.

Important: Your third-party archiving solution must require that messages are transmitted via a Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection. TLS is a security protocol that encrypts email to protect its privacy. If you try to send journal messages to a third-party archiving solution that does not support TLS, the messages will not be delivered.

Before you begin

Off-the-record messages aren’t archived, so we recommend that you:

• Turn Chat History On. To learn how, visit Turn chat history on or off.
• Don’t allow users to change their history setting.
• Prevent users from creating or joining spaces outside your organization by turning off external spaces. For more information go to Control external Chat and spaces chat options.

Set up a third-party archiving solution

Set up a third-party archiving solution

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to Menu  AppsGoogle WorkspaceGoogle Chat.
3. Click Third-party Archiving Settings.
4. (Optional) To apply the setting to a department or team, at the side, select an organizational unit. Show me how
5. Check Archiving enabled.
6. In Destination address, enter the email address where you want to send journal messages.
7. In Archival frequency, enter how often messages should be generated (every 1-24 hours).
8. (Optional) In Custom headers, enter a comma-separated list of any email message headers that should be used to uniquely identify Chat messages.
9. Click Save. Or, you might click Override for an organizational unit.

   To later restore the inherited value, click Inherit. 

Related topics

• Developer information for archiving chats