There is a new feature published at Microsoft roadmap site:
Microsoft 365 admin center: Manage ownerless Microsoft 365 groups and teams
Teams, Outlook groups, Team Sites etc. powered by Microsoft 365 Groups supports two roles: members and owners. Members can collaborate with others in the group through files, emails, messages etc. Owners manage the group membership and monitor content and conversations. When employees leave an organization or switch projects internally, it results in their existing user accounts getting deleted. If such employees were group owners, keeping track of their groups becomes critical to ensure accountability within the organization. We have introduced a new ownership governance policy to help automate the management of ownerless groups by requesting active members to become owners of the group. Admins can define who is eligible for these notifications and configure what notifications and how often these notifications are sent to active group members. Users, who are members of the ownerless groups can simply accept or decline request via the actionable email message.
Feature ID: 180749
Added to roadmap: 10/10/2023
Last modified: 10/10/2023
Product(s): Microsoft 365 Admin Center
Cloud instance(s): GCC
Platform(s): Web
Release phase(s): General Availability
But based on the feature description – all looks exactly as what we already have for years as “Microsoft 365 ownerless groups policy” which you can configure under Microsoft 365 Admin Center -> Settings -> Org settings -> Microsoft 365 groups
What if you need to update thousands of m365 groups? E.g. membership – to add a group owner or member.
In my case, it was Microsoft 365 ownerless groups policy… Details are here but in short, I needed to update ownership for 10,000 m365 groups adding 10 accounts to group owners, 1,000 groups per account.
And I figured out for myself that the fastest way is to use Microsoft Graph API with PowerShell parallel trick. Here is the PowerShell code:
You administer Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online. Part of your daily activities is providing Microsoft Graph and SharePoint Sites.Selected API permissions to other users (developers).
In Aug/Sep 2023 Microsoft pushed an update that prevents site collection admins to create or update an Azure Access Control (ACS) principal (that was the way most of developers used to get Client Id and Client secret to access SharePoint site). So your users are probably getting something like Your SharePoint tenant admin doesn’t allow site collection admins to create or update an Azure Access Control (ACS) principal message attempting to create or update SharePoint App-only principal at AppRegNew.aspx or AppInv.aspx pages. Here are more details on the issue.
Microsoft and MVPs shared some technique how to provide Sites.Selected API permissions, but dealing with scripts manually, elevating individual permissions every time you need to run the script – it all takes time and not very efficient. More and more devs are reaching you on the app. So you want to automate this process.
Solution
Solution architecture
My way to automate it includes:
SharePoint list as a frontend here you can accept intake requests, organize approval workflow and display automation results
Azure Function App as a backend here will be your PowerShell script hosted that runs on scheduled basis and takes care of actual permissions provisioning
Solution details
High-level, getting application permissions to some specific SharePoint site is a two-step process:
get application registration in Azure and properly configure it
get permissions for this application to a specific SharePoint site
For the first step – check this and this articles. I’ll focus on the second step below.
You can provide Sites.Selected permissions for the app to a site with
I will be using second one one. Also PnP.PowerShell will be used to get access to SharePoint intake site and read/update requests from SharePoint list and so on.
Azure App Registration
I registered an admin Application in Azure – “SharePoint Automation App”, added Graph Sites.FullControl.All and SharePoint Sites.FullControl.All permissions, then added Microsoft Graph Directory.Read.All permissions and got tenant admin consent:
I generated a self-signed certificate and added it to the app:
This app will be used to call provide permissions, and to connect to the SharePoint front-end.
Users will register their applications in Azure, add Graph Sites.Selected and SharePoint Sites.Selected permissions, got tenant admin consent, then request permissions to the specific site by creating an intake request – new list item.
Front-End SharePoint Site
I created a SharePoint site for automation. This site will play a front-end role for users. I created a list “Sites.Selected” and updated list columns so I have the following fields:
Target Site Url
Application Id
Permissions (read/write)
Automation Output
In real-world (Prod) – You can (should) also implement approval workflow as you’d provide permissions for the application to the site only with this site owner approval. The PowerShell code behind should also validate site owner’s consent with app access to site. But for the sake of simplicity I’ll skip this in my demo.
Azure Function App
I created an Azure Function App with the following parameters: – Runtime stack: PowerShell Core – Version: 7.2. – OS: Windows – Hosting plan: Consumption
And then PowerShell timer-triggered function in Visual Studio Code.
Function requirements.psd1 (it takes a few hours for Azure to install modules; while modules are installing – you might see “[Warning] The first managed dependency download is in progress, function execution will continue when it’s done. Depending on the content of requirements.psd1, this can take a few minutes. Subsequent function executions will not block and updates will be performed in the background.”):
@{
'Az' = '10.*'
'PnP.PowerShell' = '2.*'
}
Azure Az module to access other Azure resources. PnP.PowerShell module will be used to access SharePoint.
I will keep my admin Azure registered app in a key vault, so need somehow to let the key vault know that this specific app can access this specific credentials. So I enabled system assigned managed Identity for the Function App:
MS: “This resource is registered with Azure Active Directory. The managed identity can be configured to allow access to other resources…”. I’m going to use an object (principal) Id of this function to grant access to keyvault.
Azure key vault
Surely we do not hard-code app secrets. So we need a key vault o store app credentials.
I created a key vault under the same resource group in Azure and named it “SharePointAutomationDemo”. Then I added a roles assignment – “Key Vault Secret User” and “Key vault Reader” to the Function App via it’s managed identity:
I also assigned “Key Vault Administrator” role to the user (developer) who will add certificates/secrets to this key vault and develop Azure function code.
Any organization has it’s own data lifecycle policy and for information stored in SharePoint there must be a retention period… let say 5 years. So your files modified more than 5 years ago are going to be deleted and you will not even notice it.
What if you want to know – which documents in your OneDrive or SharePoint site is older than some specific date – here are some options to find out.
Search with query parameters (GUI)
At any level of your site hierarchy – root level, library, folder etc. – you can refine your search results with, e.g. “LastModifiedTimeForRetention<2021-01-01” if you want to get all documents older than January 1st 2021.
In the screenshot below I use newer dates, but you got the idea:
If you need only Microsoft Word documents older than some specific date, you might use query: “*.docx LastModifiedTimeForRetention<2021-01-01”
If you need only Microsoft Word documents authored by some specific User and older than some specific date, you might use query: “*.docx author:Patti LastModifiedTimeForRetention<2021-01-01”
Search with Graph API
The same query you can use to search content with Microsoft Graph API. Here is the code example:
There is a team (including SharePoint site) under Microsoft Teams. There are multiple channels under this team with types: – standard channel – shared channel – private channel
A single group owner (team owner) leaves company and the team (group) becomes ownerless. Question: what will happen with private and shared channels?
A group (team) gets a new owner. Question: what will happen with private and shared channels?
“Microsoft Teams – Teams And Channels Service made you an owner of a channel”
You are in the process of cleaning-up large Microsoft 365 environment. You need to delete SharePoint sites (e.g. due to inactivity) but you cannot get confirmation from site owners (e.g. sites or groups are ownerless).
Deleted sites could be restored within 93 days of deletion if somebody rise a hand, but there is still a risk of possible loosing of important information, e.g. in case site is needed one a year. So you need to do clean-up but at the same time you want to decrease risks of loosing information.
So, you might want to do something with sites to engage users to volunteer to be site owner if they want to keep this site – e.g. prevents using the site the regular way and let users know that the site will be deleted etc., but do not actually delete site until it will be fully clear that site is not needed for anyone and can be safely deleted.
Let us call it “Staging” period. Depending on your org culture/rules/licensing etc. it might be 6 months, or 1 year or 5 years or more.
Approach options
generally, the options are (random order):
Set site to Read-Only mode
Set site to No-Access mode
Convert group from Public to Private
Remove access to the site (remove users from group)
Rename the site
Put a banner on a top bar with a message
Message to Teams or Yammer chat
Send e-mail to site members
Implement a Microsoft 365 ownerless groups policy
You might choose to set sites to read-only mode or even no-access mode. If so – users that are still need this site are loosing ability to work with site, but site is not deleted. Consider archiving as kind of scream-test phase before actual sites deletion.
If a user who needs this site would scream (rise a ticket to restore site) – you can trigger processes of a) finding new owner for the site b) excluding the site from clean-up process c) actual restoring site to normal mode
There are some options to setup a site to Read-Only or NoAccess mode. Here is the PowerShell command:
$siteurl = "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/Team-SO-B"
Get-PnPTenantSite -Identity $siteurl | ft -a Url, LockState
Set-PnPTenantSite -Identity $siteurl -LockState ReadOnly
Get-PnPTenantSite -Identity $siteurl | ft -a Url, LockState
Set-PnPTenantSite -Identity $siteurl -LockState NoAccess
Get-PnPTenantSite -Identity $siteurl | ft -a Url, LockState
Set-PnPTenantSite -Identity $siteurl -LockState Unlock
The problem is what if the site is teams-connected or yammer-connected or just group-based. Here are some test results:
Services SharePoint site is connected to/Site State
Read-Only
NoAccess
Outlook only
N/A
N/A
SharePoint and Outlook
Outlook emails: OK Outlook files: read-only experience; No options to upload or create document; Documents are open in read-only mode. “The file couldn`t be saved to group” error message when trying to save file to a group library.
Outlook emails: OK Outlook files: empty screen; No error messages; Documents are not visible; “The file couldn`t be saved to group” error message when trying to save file to a group library.
SharePoint and Yammer
SharePoint, Teams and Outlook
Teams chats: OK Teams files: documents are open as read-only; No options to upload or create a new document SharePoint: “This site is read-only at the administrator’s request.”
Teams chats: OK Teams files: “403 FORBIDDEN” error message SharePoint: “ This site can’t be reached The webpage at https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/Team-STO-B might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address. ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE”
So you can see – behavior is inconsistent – users can still chat in Teams and Yammer and consume SharePoint content (in case the site in read-only) or get error messages or not very meaningful results (in case the site is in NoAccess mode) – so it would be not clear for users that the site is gong to be decommissioned.
