In Microsoft 365 any users create teams, private/public channels, yammer communities with SharePoint sites behind, as well as standalone SharePoint sites, so in time we – SharePoint engineers – are getting more and more inactive/abandoned groups, teams and SharePoint sites. Dealing with inactive Teams and SharePoint content – as part of Microsoft 365 governance – is a cumbersome, ungrateful and demanding, but necessary and also challenging work, especially in large organizations.

To keep growing content under control – Orgs can use:

• Built-in Microsoft 365 group expiration policy
• 3-rd party tools
• Custom solutions, PowerShell scripts, Microsoft Graph API

In enterprises it’s most likely all of them.

Built-in Microsoft 365 group expiration policy

There is a “Microsoft 365 groups expiration policy” that comes with every tenant and can help remove unused groups from the system, but since all Teams and Yammer sites are group-based – it also helps SharePoint admins make things cleaner.

This policy does a very simple job: on a regular basis it sends notifications to group owners so a group owner can renew the group, otherwise the group will expire and be deleted. Active groups are renewed automatically.

Although it looks simple, there are some tricks and gotchas, so I highly recommend to check this article, especially if you are going to enable the policy in an existing environment.

3-rd party tools

There are many 3-rd party tools on the market that helps with Microsoft 365 administration, information management and governance, e.g. ShareGate, AvePoint, Quest ControlPoint, SysKit Point etc.

Obviously, these 3-rd party tools exist because they can do what Microsoft ootb cannot do or they can do it better then Microsoft. For example

• Archive teams, SharePoint sites (this is a smart idea, because for instance, a site owner feels like content is not relevant anymore, but cannot take a risk to delete the site – so site owner can choose to archive the site – i.e. keep it for a while but not use it.
• Delegate tasks to managers or to assigned groups. This is another example of careful attitude to content – e.g. if site owner fails to respond (there might be many reasons) – a tool can reach out to user’s manager or to dedicated resolution group (vs deleting resource blindly) – so somebody can act responsibly and keep the resource or archive or delete it.

Custom solutions – PowerShell scripts, MS Graph API

PowerShell is your best friend when it comes to automation or repeated work or massive updates or ad-hoc reports etc. And PowerShell is your last resort to do something unique, what no other tools can do. PowerShell is very capable and allows to build pretty complex custom solutions.

Microsoft Graph API is a rapidly developing by Microsoft API to manage and work with data in all Microsoft 365 services. You can call MS Graph API from any popular programming language, including PowerShell. Consider Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

PnP – community-based project (not officially supported, but backed by Microsoft). They are doing a really good job providing us with knowledge, guides, tools and SDKs to code against Microsoft 365, including
– Microsoft Graph SDK
– Microsoft Graph Toolkit
– PnP Core SDK
– PnP.PowerShell
– PnPjs

You can use PowerShell to (just a few examples, but there are more scenarios):

• find and protect resources that you do not want to be a part of policies, but want to deal with manually, on individual basis, e.g.
  – sites or teams owned by top management
  – sites or teams with extremely large content
  – sites or teams with sensitive or other kind of important content
• implement Microsoft 365 group expiration policy graciously, e.g. step-by-step, via small batches (e.g. updating RenewedDateTime group property would allow you to control when this group will expire and Microsoft start sending notification)
• deal with non-group-based resources (standalone SharePoint sites), etc.

Solution stack might include VS Code, Microsoft Graph API, Azure Functions, Azure Key Vault, PowerShell, C#, PnP.PowerShell etc.

Some more things to consider on the subject

Remediate ownerless SharePoint/Teams resources.

It’s obvious that when you are trying to clean-up inactive resources – you are working with resources owners. Inactive ownerless resource will be simply deleted. That means that before implementing any kind of inactive resources policies – you’d make all efforts to find an owner for every resource to ensure that no important information will be lost in your environment.

I have multiple publications and videos on how to manage ownerless groups in Microsoft 365, including “Deep dive in ownerless Microsoft 365 groups policy“.
Here is the list of orphan Microsoft 365 resources articles.

Retention policies

Though retention policy is something that lives under Purview center (out of SharePoint scope), you should always be aware of it and consider retention configuration, so your settings do not conflict with retention settings.

Microsoft SharePoint Premium (SharePoint Advanced Management)

This is new, announced in April 2024 functionality (licensed separately). Among other benefits, it allows:

Manage site lifecycle policies – an inactive site policy that automatically detects inactive sites and sends notifications to site owners. Sounds familiar? Yes, the same as “group expiration policy” but applied to standalone also. Learn more…

Microsoft 365 Archive

Again, new functionality. MS says: “Keep your SharePoint content in Microsoft 365 with cost-effective, long-term cold tier storage – without sacrificing manageability, security, and compliance.” In fact, archived sites are no longer accessible by anyone in the organization outside of Microsoft Purview or admin search. Learn more…

Microsoft will be hiding inactive channels.

To keep users channels list relevant, Teams will automatically detect inactive channels user haven’t interacted with in a while, and automatically hide them. Users will have an option to review the list of channels and unhide some or all of them, opt out of automatic hiding from settings, or initiate this process on demand.
Feature ID: 325780