Tag Archives: Data lifecycle management

Controlling Oversharing in SharePoint Online: Smarter Access Management in Microsoft 365

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Oversharing remains one of the most persistent challenges in SharePoint Online. With the introduction of Microsoft Copilot and its AI-powered search capabilities, the issue has become even more visible—and more urgent to address. Microsoft has acknowledged this by introducing the SharePoint Advanced Management suite, aimed at helping administrators to bolster content governance throughout the Microsoft Copilot deployment journey.

Why Does Oversharing Happen?

In most cases, oversharing is unintentional. Based on my experience, the root causes typically fall into four categories:

  1. Unaware Sharing: A user shares a site, library, or folder without realizing it contains sensitive information.
  2. Unaware Uploading: A user uploads sensitive content to a location that is already broadly shared.
  3. Human Error: Mistakes like selecting the wrong group or sharing a folder instead of a file.
  4. Convenience: Users opting to share with “Everyone” to avoid the hassle of managing individual permissions.

Why It’s a Bigger Problem Today

In the past, search in Microsoft 365 was content-driven—you had to know what you were looking for. Today, search is context-driven. Microsoft 365 proactively surfaces content with suggestions like “Here’s what might be interesting to you” or “Here’s what others are working on.” This increases the risk of oversharing content being exposed.

Separate issue, non-technical, but related to the subject – not every user knows that search in Microsoft 365 is security-trimmed, i.e. provides results from only what this specific user has access to. Sometimes people might think of Microsoft 365 search the same way as general internet search (If a can see it – then everyone can see it, or why my private documents appear under Bing search?).

The Admin Dilemma

As SharePoint administrators, we’re caught in a classic catch-22:

  • Complex Microsoft products
  • Users prone to mistakes
  • Management demanding simple, fast solutions

What seemed like straightforward fixes for oversharing actually concealed the true issue, generating new problems, increasing admin burden, perplexing users, and ultimately hurting company productivity. Examples are (I would never do that):

  • Exclude sites from search indexing (Set “Allow this site to appear in search results?” to No)
  • Turn off Item insights, turn off People insights (turn off Delve)
  • Truncate enterprise search with “official” sites only (via query)

Microsoft offers two solutions: “Restrict discovery of SharePoint sites and content” and “Restricted SharePoint search”. Both solutions aimed to exclude content from search and from Copilot. Microsoft: “Restricted SharePoint Search allows you to restrict both organization-wide search and Copilot experiences to a curated set of SharePoint sites of your choice… and content users own or that they have previously accessed in Copilot.”. “With Restricted Content Discovery, organizations can limit the ability of end users to search for files from specific SharePoint sites.”

Microsoft clearly says that “limit the ability of end users to search” is a temporary measure that “gives you time to review and audit site permissions”… “to help you maintain momentum with your Copilot deployment while you’re implementing comprehensive data security”. Also: “Sites identified with the highest risk of oversharing can use Restricted Content Discovery to protect content while taking time to ensure that permissions are accurate and well-managed”.

Microsoft highlights that “Overuse of Restricted Content Discovery can negatively affect performance across search, SharePoint, and Copilot. Removing sites or files from tenant-wide discovery means that there’s less content for search and Copilot to ground on, leading to inaccurate or incomplete results”.

And finally “Restricted Content Discovery doesn’t affect existing permissions on sites. Users with access can still open files on sites with Restricted Content Discovery toggled on.”. I.e. solutions “Restricted SharePoint Search” and “Restricted Content Discovery” do not solve the root cause of the problem (oversharing), but make the problem less visible.

With over 15 years of experience in SharePoint and more than a decade working with Microsoft 365 and Azure—including large-scale tenants—I’ve seen this problem evolve. Now, with Copilot in the mix, it’s more critical than ever to implement a robust access management strategy.

Controlling Oversharing in SharePoint Online: Smarter Access Management in Microsoft 365

How to solve the real oversharing problem
(My Ideal “No-Oversharing” Tenant Configuration)

Here’s what I would recommend for minimizing oversharing in a Microsoft 365 environment (think of it as SharePoint Governance):

1. Remove “Everyone” and “Everyone Except External Users”

Disable these groups in the people picker to prevent broad, indiscriminate sharing. Instead, provide other options for sharing content with larger audiences (see below).

2. Implement Sensitivity Labels for Sites

  • Enforce mandatory sensitivity labels for all sites.
  • Labels should control site visibility (e.g., Private, Public) and be clearly named

The label is visible across all interfaces—Teams, SharePoint, libraries, lists, folders—so users always know how wide the content is shared from the sensitivity label.

3. Empower Users with Guardrails

  • Allow users to create Teams and communities, but enforce sensitivity labels.
  • Enable requests for standalone sites (Team or Communication) with required labels.
  • Disallow private or shared channels under public Teams to avoid label mismatches (e.g., a private channel labeled “Public”).

Benefits of This Approach

Once implemented:

  • Users will always know whether a site is private or public.
  • Sharing with “Everyone” on private sites will be technically impossible.
  • Users needing broad access can request public sites, e.g.
    • Public Teams for collaboration with everyone (allows read/write access)
    • Communication site for publishing information (allows read only access)

Yes, this may lead to more sites and Teams. Yes, this may lead to more tickets from users who at private site wanted to break permissions as usual and share list or library or folder with everyone. Yes, we would need to develop automation that can help manage the scale. But that’s a worthwhile trade-off for reducing oversharing!

More to consider

Large Custom Security Groups

There might be Large Custom Security Groups in tenant. What if the user wants to share site with one of these Large Custom Security Groups? What kind of site that would be? Private? Public?

Consider the following. When a team owner adds a security group to team members – it’s not a group added, but individual users. That makes sense – all team members can clearly see who are the other team members. That makes the team private. Private team should not be additionally shared at SharePoint site level. Only permissions should be provided through team.

Public team – as well as public standalone site – can be shared with EEEU. But what if the requirements are not to share the site with “Everyone…” but share with some other Large Custom Security Group – e.g. “All employee” or “All Central Office Users”? Can we do it? Should site be private or public in this case?
My opinion: site should be labelled as public. Site owner can request a public standalone site or create a team self-service, then site owner can remove “Everyone…” group from permissions and add a custom security group at any level.

Some orgs choose to recommend providing access to the standalone SharePoint sites via security groups vs SharePoint groups. So it is possible we have a private standalone site with access provided to security group (or m365 group). This is where an or should have their own policy – how big the group should be to be considered as large group and trigger site label as public. There are also dynamic security groups.

Automation Requirements

To support this model, we’ll need (at least) the following custom-designed solutions:

  • Automated Site Provisioning: A request-and-approval process for creating labeled standalone sites.
  • Channel Monitoring: A custom solution to detect and flag private/shared channels under public Teams, since there’s no out-of-the-box enforcement.
  • Large Custom Security Groups Monitoring: make a list of large custom security groups users can share information with – and check on scheduled bases – if the site is shared with large custom security group – site must be labelled as public.
  • Sharing site with “Everyone except external users” : If user accidentally removes “Everyone except external users” from public site – there must be an option for user to add “Everyone except external users” with permissions Read or Edit. Site can be shared with “Everyone except external users” only at the root site level and only if site labelled as Public.

Environment Clean-Up

To prevent oversharing, we should not only “from now on” follow the strategy described above, but also make sure our existing sites are compliant with our governance. This would be another challenge.

References

SharePoint Inactive Site Policies

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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.

SharePoint Inactive Site Policy vs m365 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

FeatureGroups Expiration PolicyInactive 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 notifiedGroup OwnersSite admin (group owner), site owners (*) TBC
Notifications come from emailmsgroupsteam@microsoft.comno-reply@sharepointonline.com
What if resource is activegroup is automatically renewed, no emails sentpolicy is not triggered against active sites
Can admin download report (list of inactive groups/sites)NoYes
Period of inactivity configurationConfigured in days, should be greater than or equal to 30 daysOptions are: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months
Actions available (Options provided) to a resource ownerrenew the group
delete the group		certify site
learn how to delete a site
What happens with resources owner did not take action (or with orphan resources).Notifications is sent to a specific email address, group is deletedsite 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, but Microsoft says that inactive sites policy email template will be customizable – in the Site lifecycle management policies v2 expected summer 2025.

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 with Multiple Owners
  • Sites inactive for over a year

Inactive sites policy behavior

Policy sends emails immediately after policy activation. That means if you have thousands of inactive sites you might hit a 10k exchange limit of daily emails sent.

If a user owns multiple inactive sites – he/she will get multiple emails.

You can scope the policy down by site template, sensitivity label and creation source if you want different behavior for different types of sites, e.g. if you want to setup longer period of inactivity for one type of sites and shorter for others… not sure when it makes sense…

Implementing an Inactive sites policy

First of all – It is highly recommended to take care of ownerless sites (find owners) before triggering an Inactive sites policy.

If you have a relatively new tenant – you probably have not much inactive sites, so turning the policy on should not be a problem. The older your tenant is the more inactive sites you have. For older tenants you probably already have a lot of inactive sites – ant that could be a problem. So we’d need to take care of initial policy implementation, and after some time it will just work so we could forget about it.

There is no way to pilot this policy with pre-selected scope of sites or users. You can scope the policy down by site template, sensitivity label and creation source, but you cannot scope the policy down the way only sites or uses you want to be a testers or pilot project members will be the target of the policy.

In small orgs there should be no problems implementing this policy. Still I would start from just getting a report. There is a “How long after the last activity should a site be considered inactive?” configuration, so I’d start from the longest – 6 months, then move to the shortest you need. Medium orgs could get some ideas from recommendations to large orgs below.

In large orgs you might

  • trigger a spike in number of tickets submitted by users who needs help
  • hit a maximum sending limit with Exchange Online which is 10,000 email recipients per day

So it would be crucial for enterprises to avoid an initial surge and start from smaller number of recipients, and gradually let the policy work at a full strength. One of the options to achieve that would be

  1. configure the policy for reports only, get inactive sites report
  2. select sites owner and admins in a separate list – then select only unique ones – so every user will get only one email, split this list into small chunks
  3. communicate to site owners (by chunks) – using enterprise-approved “send from” email and enterprise-branded email template saying that the policy is gonna be implemented, you might receive an email (like this one – screenshot), you can trust this email and click buttons. A list of site urls user owns must be included in the email, so user could visit these sites
    (Optionally) you can instruct users how they can delete sites if site is no longer needed or archive sites if they are not sure if it is still needed or not

If so – it’d

  • forewarn users so they would know to do and not be surprised and would create less tickets
  • users might choose to delete or archive sites which would also
  • users would visit their inactive sites and trigger sites activity, and that should dramatically decrease number of emails sent to users initially, on the day one of policy implementation
    ideally – if users visit all sites – you’d have no inactive sites, so you’d just turn the policy on with no fear

then you’d wait for a couple of weeks, get new report to ensure that you have much less inactive sites – and you’d just enable the inactive sites policy (starting from the longest period – 6 month of inactivity)

References

Content Shared with Everyone: Access Review

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This article is for SharePoint or Microsoft 365 admins focusing on governance and information protection. If you have SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) – aka SharePoint Premium licensed or you got at least one Copilot for Microsoft 365 license (as having m365 Copilot license automatically enables SharePoint Advanced Management in tenant), then under reports – Data access governance (in SharePoint admin center) – you can not only get Content shared with ‘Everyone except external users’ (EEEU) reports, but also initiate access review. Let us look more closely at this functionality and discuss the pros and cons..

I’ll not repeat Microsoft documents:
– SharePoint Advanced Management
– Content shared with ‘Everyone except external users’ (EEEU) reports
– Site access reviews for Data access governance reports
but I’ll focus on what is not there and a real-world experience.

Reports

First of all, report does not provide you with all SharePoint content shared with “Everyone except external users”. Report helps you with what was shared with EEEU in the last 28 days. That drastically limits usage of this feature. I.e. you should first get initial report on the all content shared with EEEU, and somehow take care of it by other means (consider How to Find Content Shared with Everyone in SharePoint and Teams), and only then you can use this Microsoft’s content shared with EEEU report and access review.

You can share content with EEEU or directly – by adding EEEU to resource permissions directly or by including EEEU into SharePoint group. So content shared with EEEU reports come in two flavors – “Specific files, folders and lists” and “Site membership”

“Specific files, folders and lists” user experience

When you initiate access review from the “Specific files, folders and lists” type of report – users (site admins/owners) get email notification that says “You have sites with specific files, folders or lists shared with ‘Everyone except external users’. This means everyone in your organization has access to this content. Review the items shared for potential oversharing and manage their access.“

Content Shared with Everyone: Access Review - notification email example

Scrolling down, in the email, site owner can see a list (table) of incompliant sites with the following columns: Site name, privacy, sensitivity, external sharing and “Items shared”. Site name is clickable and sends user to the root of the site.

Below the list of sites there is a button “View shared items” that sends user to the special system page –
“https://orgname.sharepoint.com/teams/site01/_layouts/15/siteaccessreview.aspx/<id>” where he/she can see list of SharePoint items shared with EEEU. Columns are: (item) Name, Shared on (date), Shared by (email), Action (manage access). Item name and manage access are clickable.

Content Shared with Everyone: Access Review - user experience - siteaccessreview.aspx page example

If an item is a library item – e.g. document or a folder – it is displayed correctly – with icon according to the doc type and doc name. Clicking on the doc name – an actual document opens so you can review it’s content.

If item is a list item – it is displayed incorrectly – no icon, no meaningful info about the item (it is displayed as “”). Clicking on the link – a warning icon and message “Can’t preview this file. Open the file or download it to view in your desktop app”. Buttons “Open” and “Download” are there but not helpful as well.

Clicking on “Manage access” opens almost standard “Manage access” dialogue you can have via “manage access” item context menu, but with no “…” more options at the top right:

which makes this dialogue screen useless, as you can only provide additional access to the item or remove all access. You cannot remove EEEU from access without three dots “More options”.

Manage Access from the Policy:

Regular Manage Access:

“Stop sharing” literally removes all permissions to the item except owners

Under the “Groups” tab – you’d see that the item is shared with “Everyone except external users” but you will not be able to remove just this group from access…

By clicking on a group name – site owner will be able to change this group permissions, but the option “No direct access” is not selectable…

“Site membership” user experience

In the case with a “Site membership” report, text would be slightly different: “You have sites where ‘Everyone except external users’ has been added to the site membership. This means everyone in your organization has access to this site. Review site permissions for potential oversharing and manage access.“, which makes sense.

Right after that, in the email, site owner can see a list of incompliant sites with the following columns: Site name, privacy, sensitivity, external sharing and “Groups with org-wide access”. Site name is clickable and sends user to the root of the site.

content shared with EEEU access review - Site membership user experience - You have sites where 'Everyone except external users' has been added to the site membership. This means everyone in your organization has access to this site. Review site permissions for potential oversharing and manage access.

Then there is a button “View SharePoint groups” that sends user to the special system page –
“https://orgname.sharepoint.com/teams/site01/_layouts/15/siteaccessreview.aspx/<id>” where he/she can see list of SharePoint groups (clickable) with EEEU as members.

By clicking on a group name – admin opens standard SharePoint “People and Group” membership page:
/_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=X, which is nice, because from this screed a site owner can simply remove this group from the access list using Actions-> Remove:

siteaccessreview.aspx page

User can navigate directly to the reviews page:
“https://orgname.sharepoint.com/teams/site01/_layouts/15/siteaccessreview.aspx” and if there were reviews initiated by SharePoint admins – and it’ll work – admin will see all access reviews initiated for this site – columns are: Review name, Description, Requested on (date), Status, reviewed by (email) and admin comment. In case no reviews were initiated against tie site – “You have no reviews to take action on” will be displayed. That’s good.

Complete review

On the bottom of the siteaccessreview.aspx page you’ll see “Complete review”

Click on it, add comment (optionally) and confirm:

SharePoint Admin is able to see the status of every site access review stats – pending or completed – in GUI and in the .CSV report saved.

Admin experience: GUI only

Once you got report – you can initiate access review. All must be done in GUI, click-click-click selecting sites… But what if you have thousands? There is no PowerShell cmdlets or API for this functionality, which really limits your ability to implement it gracefully, especially in large Microsoft 365 environments and automate it.

Download detailed report

Report “Specific files/folders/lists…” does not include files, folders, list – i.e. it does not include what exactly is shared with EEEU. Report includes site id, url, name, template, is it teams-connected, sensitivity (?), privacy, external sharing, primary admin name and email, and number of items (?) shared with EEEU.

So technically you can communicate to site owners, but you’d need to rely on them to figure out what content is shared with everyone.

Email template

When you initiate Site access review – an e-mail notification is send to site owners. This e-mail is not customizable at all. The only admin can do is to add a message (for every “initiate Site access review” action). But the email looks really similar to the site lifecycle policies email notification, and Microsoft is working on version 2 of the policies with a customizable email template.

This email comes from “SharePoint Online <no-reply@sharepointonline>” address (not customizable), so comes “from outside of your organization” and can be considered as scam.

Microsoft’s logos and other graphics are blocked by default and e-mail includes a button “View shared items” – enough red flags for users to consider it as spam. Keep this in mind.

The good news is e-mail contains site name – so site owner can recognize it at act accordingly.

Usage scenarios

Small tenants

In small Microsoft 365 environments – yes, this functionality probably can be used “as is” (and should be used). Especially for new tenants – I’d recommend enable reports and use this feature on a regular basis.

Medium-size tenants

I’m not sure. It depends on your governance rules and company culture.

Enterprises

I’m very pessimistic if this functionality is useful in large environments. Reasons are:

  • if your tenant is not new – you already have a lot of overshared content, so you still need to come up with your custom solution (idk – PowerShell scripts?) to deal with oversharing. But once you designed your custom solution – why don’t you continue to use it?
  • In enterprises usually all the communication must follow approved templates, branding and so on.
  • User experience of reviewing shares with everyone… and managing permissions designed very poorly… In enterprise you do not want to deal with thousands of tickets from site owners who could not figure it out
  • In enterprises you’d think of automation

SharePoint Advanced Management

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SharePoint Advanced Management is an add-on to Microsoft 365. Microsoft says that it is a powerful suite of tools for IT admins to bolster content governance throughout the Microsoft Copilot deployment journey. Let us have a closer look at what SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) is how exactly it helps with governance enforcement in the Copilot era.

Microsoft classifies SAM’s features as “Manage content sprawl”, “Manage content lifecycle”, “Manage permissions and access”. I’d put SAM’s tools into these buckets: Reports, Policies, Search, Features.

SAM Reports

Reports are something that provides you with data, so you can analyze these date and use them to build/update your own governance strategy and maybe take some immediate action. Reports available are:

  • Change history reports
    you can choose org-wide or site-level settings, specify date range, sites and all or specific admins
  • Enterprise App Insights
  • OneDrive Accounts report
  • Data Access Governance (3 different ones)
    • Sharing Links with 3 pre-configured reports:
      Anyone links, People in your org links and Specific People links shared externally
    • Sensitivity labels applied to files: select label -> generate report
    • Content Shared with Everyone Except External Users:
      to discover specific sites whose content was made accessible for EEEU
      you can choose from two types of report: where specific files/folders/lists are shared with EEEU or “Site membership” where EEEU was added as a member and initialize access review
      (see Deep Dive into SAM DAG Content shared with EEEU access review)

SAM Policies

Policies allows you to set some governance rules, so that rules will be applied automatically, with no or little your intervention. SharePoint Advanced Management policies are:

AI Insights – report feature that uses a language model to identify patterns and potential issues and provide actionable recommendations to solve issues

Features

Features are smaller that policies, more like an update to existing functionality.

  • Conditional access to SharePoint site policy
    This enhances existing conditional access Entra Id feature with the ability to apply the policy to SharePoint sites directly or via Site sensitivity label.
  • OneDrive access restriction
  • SharePoint site-level access restrictions
  • Block download policy
  • Your recent actions
  • Default sensitivity labels for document libraries
  • Site access review

SAM for Search

I put it separately:

  • restrict discovery of SharePoint sites and content
  • Restricted SharePoint search

TBP

Microsoft 365 SharePoint Archive: deep dive

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Microsoft announced SharePoint Archive in 2023 and make the feature generally available in Apr 2024. Though there are good Microsoft’s articles on how to enable and configure SharePoint Archive, as well as some FAQ pages, there are still a lot of questions regarding behavior details, e.g.

  • what happens with Team content if the group-based site is Archived
  • is there an API or how do we archive/restore sites programmatically
  • would MS Graph Search API work for archived sites

I have just activated the feature and I’m planning updating this page with my gotchas and findings…

Why Archive?

  • If the site is not used, but you are not ready to delete it (or cannot delete it for compliance) – you can save money on storage by archiving site.
    – Regular SharePoint Storage = $0.2 per GB per month
    – Archived Storage = $0.05 per GB per month

Reactivation fee

How much is to restore a site from Archive?
Microsoft says restore is free within 7 days. After 7 days it’ll cost $0.6 per GB.
In the example below Microsoft charges me $1 to restore a simple OotB site with no documents:

This amount is based on the retail price for reactivations. Your actual charges may be lower, and can be seen in Microsoft 365 Archive bill

Microsoft says “This amount is based on the retail price for reactivations. Your actual charges may be lower, and can be seen in Microsoft 365 Archive bill.”

Reactivate site. You'll be charged a reactivation fee. This reactivation fee is based on the retail price for reactivations. Your actual charges may be lower, and can be seen in Microsoft 365 Archive bill. The site will move back to Active sites page and start consuming active storage. This action can't be cancelled once it starts. Estimated reactivation fee $1

Another confirmation is requested:

Reactivate site.

You’ll be charged a reactivation fee. This reactivation fee is based on the retail price for reactivations. Your actual charges may be lower, and can be seen in Microsoft 365 Archive bill.

The site will move back to Active sites page and start consuming active storage. This action can’t be cancelled once it starts.
Estimated reactivation fee
$1

Reactivation request submitted It will take up to 24 hours for the site to reactivate and move to the active sites page

After a few days I saw cost “<0.01$”

===========

To be continued…

Dealing with Ownerless Groups in large Microsoft 365 environments

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Microsoft 365 groups is a key concept in today’s collaboration landscape that includes Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, SharePoint etc. Access to resources is organized via groups. It is essential that every Microsoft 365 group has an owner (owners) so we have somebody to enforce Collaboration governance through.

Scenario

Let say you administer a large Microsoft 365 environment (e.g. ~100k+ users and/or ~50K+ sites) and after some years you have a lot of ownerless groups and sites (around 5k probably), and a lot of inactive groups and sites (maybe 15k). You are getting more and more ownerless groups – dozens each week. You are thinking of stopping bleeding and cleaning this up…

Out-of-the-box we have Microsoft 365 groups expiration policy and Microsoft 365 ownerless groups policy. You might also have some 3-rd party tools implemented – e.g. ShareGate, SysKit Point.

If you do not care – you might just activate both OotB Microsoft policies – via GUI – they are simple to activate. But once you activated policies – they will trigger thousands of emails. Now imagine a person is getting dozens of emails asking him/her to be an owner or to renew the group that probably he/she has no idea about… What will happen next? People will probably ignore these alerts. Then? Groups and sites will be automatically deleted. And then? Right, there will be a huge noise and many angry users and high-priority tickets and you will have to restore sites/teams and finally you’ll have to deal with all that mess manually.

So, what is the right way to clean-up a large Microsoft 365 environment from ownerless and inactive teams, groups sites? Not a trivial question, hah?

Solution

Disclaimer: I’m sharing here my personal opinion with no obligations or warranty etc., so you’d dig into all the technologies used and based on your particular situation build your own plan. But my personal opinion is based on my 15+ years experience with SharePoint, including really large environments.

Note: It is always a good idea to discuss your plans with you org’s communication team and helpdesk/service-desk to adjust clean-up activities with other initiatives and let other people be prepared.

High-level steps for group-based Sites:

  • consider implementing Minimum 2 owners per group policy to stop bleeding. Currently Microsoft 365 does not have such functionality, so consider 3-rd party tool like SysKit Point or custom PowerShell script that sends notifications
    • apply this policy to groups where you already have 2+ owners – it’ll be safe
    • apply this policy to all other groups by chanks
  • consider custom PowerShell clean-up, e.g. you can simply delete groups with no owners and no members and/or inactive groups with no content and/or groups that are inactive for a long time (this must be aligned with business and legal)
  • implement Microsoft’s Ownerless groups policy in “Clean-Up” configuration; there are some tricks and gotchas worth a separate post, but in short
    • avoid scoping down this policy via people (security groups)
    • implement it for all groups all users with 6-7 weeks and custom e-mail template
  • implement Microsoft groups expiration policy in “Clean-Up” configuration… again, there are a few different strategies – see this article
  • change Microsoft Ownerless groups policy configuration to a “Permanent” mode configuration set
  • (or) change Microsoft 365 groups expiration policy with a “Permanent” mode configuration
  • (or) develop and implement custom staged decommissioning process – kind of “last chance” set of scripts to discontinue groups that are still ownerless after all efforts above. Staged means we do not just delete these groups, but e.g. we can
    – rename ownerless groups
    – convert groups from public to private
    – set teams to archived mode
    – exclude sites from copilot search with “Restricted SharePoint Search” etc.
    – set site to no-access mode
    – remove members from the group
    – and finally delete the group with connected team team and site
    I have a separate article on custom staged decommissioning process

Note: There will always be ownerless groups in large environment. We have to live with it. So all steps above – think of it as a processes – we’d need to do it on regular basis.

All above was mostly about group-based sites (as we have OotB Microsoft policies for groups), but we probably have the same problem (or even worth) with standalone sites (that would be a separate topic).

SharePoint Inactive Site Policies

Recently (2024-2025) Microsoft developed SharePoint Advanced Management set of features and offers it as an add-on to SharePoint (aka SharePoint premium). SAM includes Inactive Site Policies under Site lifecycle management. This policy can work not only against group-based sites, but against all sites, including standalone sites. The other big difference is that this SharePoint Inactive Site Policy do not delete sites, but allows to set site to read-only mode and archive. See SharePoint Inactive Site Policies deep dive.

Archiving SharePoint Sites

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What is archiving SharePoint sites and why we’d need it?

Disclaimer: Archival that was announced at Microsoft Inspire 2023 (Introducing Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive) is not what we are discussing here.
Though it might be considered as an option (as archived sites are still visible for admins but not visible for users), MS SharePoint Archive require additional licensing.

Scenario

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 StateRead-OnlyNoAccess
Outlook onlyN/AN/A
SharePoint and OutlookOutlook 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 OutlookTeams 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.

to be continued…

(WIP – Work in progress)

How to create an old document in SharePoint

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Sometimes, mostly during PoC or testing policies like retention policy or lifecycle policy you would need some documents created and updated weeks, months or even years ago.

But if you create or upload a document in SharePoint library – it will be just a regular new document. So, how to get old documents in the new environment?

I see two options:

  1. Sync with OneDrive
    If you sync a library with your local folder (done Microsoft by OneDrive desktop app) and put some old document in your synced folder – the doc will be synchronized back to SharePoint library with Created and Modified properties preserved.
  2. Make the document older with PowerShell
    With “Set-PnPListItem” PowerShell command you can update not only such properties like Title, but also “Created By”, “Modified By” and even date and time document was created and modified via “Created” and “Modified”.
    Optionally you can play with document history with “-UpdateType” parameter.
    UpdateType possible values are:
    • Update: Sets field values and creates a new version if versioning is enabled for the list
    • SystemUpdate: Sets field values and does not create a new version. Any events on the list will trigger.
    • UpdateOverwriteVersion: Sets field values and does not create a new version. No events on the list will trigger