SharePoint Advanced Management includes Inactive Site Policies under Site lifecycle management. Effective content lifecycle management is a key pillar of SharePoint governance. It plays a vital role in optimizing storage, preserving data integrity, and ensuring regulatory compliance. By systematically removing inactive or outdated sites, it also enhances security. Additionally, it supports successful Copilot implementation by ensuring that the information accessed is both accurate and current. So, how exactly this Inactive site policy works and what is the difference between Entra Id groups expiration policy and SharePoint Inactive Site Policy.
Inactive site policy vs groups expiration policy
The Groups Expiration Policy has been a feature of Azure AD (Entra ID) for quite some time. It is included at no additional cost. This policy automatically notifies group owners about upcoming expirations and provides options to renew or delete the group. Since all self-created Teams teams and Viva Engage communities are backed by SharePoint sites and managed through Microsoft 365 Groups, this policy also plays a significant role in SharePoint governance ensuring that information stored in SharePoint remains current and properly maintained. I have an article Microsoft 365 group expiration policy deep dive.
Inactive Site Policy is a feature of SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM), which is an add-on and require premium SharePoint license. It also Identifies inactive sites, Sends notifications to site owners and can automatically archive or make sites read-only. Sound like very similar to to groups expiration policy.
Key differences
| Feature | Groups Expiration Policy | Inactive Site Policy |
|---|---|---|
| Where to configure Who can configure | Entra Id Groups Admin | SharePoint Admin center SharePoint Admin |
| Scope (policy is applied to) | Microsoft 365 Groups (including group-based sites, like teams, yammer) | SharePoint Sites (including both – group-based and non-group-based sites) |
| Who is notified | Group Owners | Site admin (group owner), site owners (*) TBC |
| Notifications come from email | msgroupsteam@microsoft.com | no-reply@sharepointonline.com |
| Options provided to an owner | renew the group delete the group | certify site learn how to delete a site |
| Can admin download report (list of inactive groups/sites) | No | Yes |
| Period of inactivity config options | Should be greater than or equal to 30 days | 1, 2, 3 or 6 monthes |
| What happens with resources owner did not take action (or with orphan resources). | Notifications is sent to a specific email address, group is deleted | site is archived or set to read-only or nothing |
Inactive site policy user experience
Here is how the email notification looks like:
Note that
The email subject includes “Action required” and site title (name).
It always says “… has been inactive for more than a month” even if the policy configured for “6 months”.
It shows SharePoint logo, which might mislead “teams-oriented” users.
Site title is not clickable, so site admin/owner cannot just click site link but have to navigate to site manually.
When user clicks button “Certify site” – a message “The action completed successfully” pops up at the bottom of the email for a few seconds and then disappears. The email itself does not change, so when a user opens the same email again – there is no visual evidences the action was taken.
At the bottom of the email Microsoft mentions tenant name.
The email template is the same for all kinds of policies – it does not matter if the policy action is configured configured as “do nothing”, or to automatically enforce archive site or set it to read-only. I.e. email just says “Select Certify site to confirm if it’s still in use, or consider deleting it if the site is no longer needed.”. Email does not inform users that site will be set to read-only or archived.
Also there is no link where a user can get more info on the subject.
Admin – Inactive sites report
You can download a csv report of inactive sites generated by policy.
Report includes fields:
Site name, URL, Template, Connected to Teams, Sensitivity label, Retention Policy, Site lock state, Last activity date (UTC), Site creation date (UTC), Storage used (GB), Number of site owners, Email address of site owners, Number of site admins, Email address of site admins, Action status, Total notifications count, Action taken on (UTC), Duration in Read-Only.
There is no GUI to see the list of inactive sites (you can only download a csv file), but there is a magic button “Get AI insights”.
Get AI insights
Here are insights I have seen so far:
- Inactive sites with significant storage usage
- Multiple sites owned by the same account
- Sites inactive for over a year
Inactive sites policy behavior
tbc…