Tag Archives: Microsoft 365 Governance

KBA, how-to, thoughts related to Microsoft 365 SharePoint Governance

Azure ACS retirement: How to prepare your tenant – Guide for SharePoint Admins

1 Reply

Microsoft has announced the retirement of Azure ACS, and as SharePoint administrators, we must take action. The retirement of ACS is a significant change – an entire era of SharePoint app‑only service principals will come to an end. SharePoint developers have relied on ACS‑based applications since 2013 to build custom solutions, and in software development, change always takes time. Code originally designed around ACS must now be reviewed and refactored to accommodate new authentication models, then recompiled, retested, and redeployed. Because of this, it is critical that organizations begin remediation efforts now to reduce risk and avoid major operational issues leading up to April 2026.

Another at‑risk group is data analysts. During an earlier phase of Azure Data Factory (ADF) adoption, ACS‑based applications were required, which means a significant number of long‑running data pipelines may still rely on ACS for authentication.

3 weeks before ACS EOL

If you have only recently learned that Microsoft’s Azure ACS–based (classic) app connections to SharePoint will stop working in a matter of weeks, and you are trying to determine whether you or your clients will be impacted, you may not have time to follow a detailed, step‑by‑step remediation guide below I shared ~ year ago. In that situation, one practical option is to conduct a controlled “scream test.”
I have been working with ACS for many years and have been preparing a large tenant for ACS retirement since 2024. Based on that experience, the following are the essential lessons and recommendations that matter most when time is limited.

The PnP team has done excellent work with the Microsoft 365 Assessment Tool. It provides visibility into applications with ACS enabled at both the site and tenant levels, including details about which sites an application has permissions to.
However, the raw output is only the starting point. Administrators still need to analyze audit and sign‑in logs and correlate the data to determine which ACS applications are actually active. In practice, this often reveals two additional layers of complexity: not all ACS‑enabled applications are currently in use, and not all active applications necessarily rely on ACS for authentication.
The next challenge is identifying the appropriate application and site owners and communicating the required remediation steps. At this stage, communication is frequently ignored or overlooked. This highlights a critical gap—the operational distance between the M365 Assessment Tool output and an application owner taking concrete action. Bridging that gap requires time, coordination, and sustained follow‑up.

An alternative approach is a “scream test”—a controlled, temporary disablement of ACS at the tenant level. This is a significantly faster way to surface unresponsive, unknown, or otherwise disengaged application owners whose solutions are still affected by ACS retirement. In many cases, only an actual service disruption creates sufficient urgency for owners to prioritize migration to modern authentication.
This approach does involve risk, as it may temporarily impact existing workloads or data pipelines. However, that risk is justified and, in practice, necessary to identify applications that still rely on ACS—even though they should have already been migrated. Without this step, such dependencies often remain hidden until Microsoft enforces the change, at which point remediation becomes reactive rather than controlled.

Recommended transition tactics: for developers

  • Get a new App Registration in Azure (Entra Id) with Sites.Selected permissions, ensure no ACS permissions provided to the app (see details on Sites.Selected) and use it
  • Prioritize using Microsoft Graph API
  • If Graph API does not provide required functionality – it’s ok to use SharePoint API, but keep in mind in this case certificate should be used (not secret) for authentication

Recommended transition tactics: for SharePoint admins

High-level recommended steps are:

  • Keep saving audit logs
  • Encourage users and developers to register applications in Azure (not in SharePoint)
  • Start providing Sites.Selected permissions
  • Disable ability for site owners to use AppRegNew and AppInv
    Stop registering service principals via AppRegNew and providing ACS permissions via AppInv
  • Pull report on existing Apps that use ACS permissions
  • Notify developers and users of the ACS apps
  • Switch ACS off earlier than Microsoft

Thinkin on devs – keep in mind:
– ACS apps have a huge legacy – tons of articles and code examples and so on…
– Switching to a modern authentication method would require changes in code (though minor, but still), so developers must be engaged
– Any change in code would require another round of code compilation, testing, deploying etc.

That means it is not easy (sometimes it is not even possible) to adopt a new modern authentication method. It requires efforts and time, so you need to notify dev as earlier as possible. So it is crucial to complete steps above and start communicating to users as earlier as possible.

Detailed steps for SharePoint administrators:

Keep audit logs

This should be done in advance, but if you did not – starting today and until it’s over you’d get audit logs from Microsoft 365 purview center – consider selecting all events with record type SharePointAppPermissionOperation. Also might be helpful to keep events anyone visited appinv.aspx or appregnew.aspx page. Pull logs now starting with earliest available event (usually 90 days). Some audit logs are available only through Microsoft Graph API. See more details regarding audit logs for ACS tracking KBA.

Encourage users registering applications in Azure (not in SharePoint)

Creating App Registrations in Azure is usually not what SharePoint admins do. Sometimes users are allowed to register apps, sometimes it is blocked for a regular user and done by identity management (or so) but the main idea – users and developers should be able to get service principals (App Registrations) in Azure. Users would need Sites.Selected permissions consented (see more about Sites.Selected) or granular permissions consented (more on granular permissions to SharePoint).

Some pro’s of App Registered in Entra Id (vs SharePoint App-only service principals):
– It supports authentication with client secret and/or certificate, custom expiration time
– It supports both APIs – Microsoft Graph API and classic SharePoint REST API

Be prepared to instruct users how to get and use certificates in their app registrations.

Provide Sites.Selected permissions

99% of requests for application permissions to SharePoint would require access to a specific site (sites), or to a specific list/library/folder/file (but not to entire tenant). So consider providing Sites.Selected permissions by default (or granular permissions when they are in GA). Create a process so users can request permissions to SharePoint sites for their Azure-Registered Apps. Consider automation if you are a large company (here is one of the possible Sites.Selected automation solutions).

Inform user that ACS is deprecated and you do not provide any new ACS permissions.

Disable registering new service principals in SharePoint

Once you are good in providing non-ACS permissions, it’s time to disable registering service principals in SharePoint. Users should not be able to get a new SharePoint App-only service principals (apps that they used to get from SharePoint sites just going to AppRegNew.aspx).

Disable ability for site owners register service principals in SharePoint via appregnew.aspx is done via Set-SPOTenant PowerShell cmdlet:

Set-SPOTenant -SiteOwnerManageLegacyServicePrincipalEnabled $false

When the value is set to false, the service principal can only be created or updated by the SharePoint tenant admin. Using AppInv.aspx page will also be disabled for site owners. Your users will start seeing “Your SharePoint tenant admin doesn’t allow site collection admins…” message (see details), but that’s ok.

There might be rare cases when your in-house solutions or 3-rd party apps got their secrets expired and would require new legacy ACS-based permissions, it is tempting to allow ACS permissions as an exception (as technically it is possible for SharePoint service admin to provide ACS-based access to sites), but I would strictly discourage you to do so. If you decide to provide ACS – track this activity (so you know for whom this ACS-based permissions were provided).

Pull report on existing ACS Apps that use ACS permissions

You need to know who are your vulnerable clients – you should pull reports to get a list of existing Apps that use ACS permissions, apps owners, maybe sites these apps have access to and sites owners

You can get list of developers combining
– audit log data from Admin Center and Graph API
– report from Entra Id on apps and owners
– report from SharePoint sites on permissions provided for apps
– reports generated by PnP Microsoft 365 assessment tool

Here is the detailed KBA on inventory active legacy ACS service principals in tenant

Consider the following steps to get ACS apps owners

  • get ACS apps with permissions using Microsoft 365 assessment tool
  • pull these apps owners from Entra Id
  • using Graph API audit logs data – mark apps active/inactive based on date of the latest login

Notify developers and users of the ACS apps

From the step above we can have a lost of legacy ACS apps and their owners, as well as apps activity (last login), so we can start communicating developers (app owners):

  • As earlier as possible – e.g. in March-April 2025 (1 year before ACS EOL), notify all apps owners that they need to transition to Azure apps and Selected permissions
  • Get ACS apps activity and repeat communication, including active app owners
  • Get ACS apps activity and repeat communication, including owners of sites apps still have access to
  • Communicate to all apps owners that there will be a temporary and permanent shut down of ACS (see below)
  • I case you have ACS apps with tenant-level permissions – communicate to them separately

Switch ACS off earlier than Microsoft

You need to plan actual ACS apps disablement in tenant in advance – earlier than Microsoft will do it (though Microsoft can decide put it off). Also consider temporary switch off ACS (“scream test”) even earlier, let say, starting January 2026.

Temporary and permanent ACS disablements before official ACS EOL are needed as scream tests – in case there are irresponsive app owners who ignored all communications and still use ACS apps. Disabling ACS early may cause problems with existing applications, but it is necessary to avoid more serious consequences when the time comes for Microsoft to turn it off. So be prepared to handle tickets and communicate to apps owners in advance.

There are might be cases when software was developed by somebody else and current app owners simply does not know – if the app relies on ACS or not. So scream test – temporary switching off ACS might help owners to understand if the app uses ACS or not.

This might be your draft plan:

  • schedule the first temporary 30 minutes ACS apps disablement ~3 months before EOL
  • schedule the second temporary 2 hours ACS apps disablement ~2 months before EOL
  • schedule the 3rd temporary 24 hours ACS apps disablement 6 weeks before EOL
  • schedule the full (permanent) ACS apps disablement ~4 weeks before EOL

Be prepared to switch it back on if scream…

References

Restricted SharePoint Search Deep Dive

Leave a reply

Restricted SharePoint Search is a new Microsoft feature to mitigate sites oversharing issue when you are implementing Copilot. The feature is documented here, but still I have some questions, e.g.:

  • How about external data? Copilot can use external data to learn from via agents and connectors. But would Restricted SharePoint Search if implemented allow data from external connectors to be used in copilot?
  • “Users’ OneDrive files, chats, emails, calendars they have access to” – means own data for every single user or all shared OD data?
  • What exactly is “Files from their frequently visited SharePoint sites”? I mean, how frequently user needs to visit site for this?
  • What exactly means “Files that the users viewed, edited, or created.”
  • What about teams chat messages, e-mails, viva engage messages?
  • “Files that were shared directly with the users” – does that mean “individual files shared” or can include folders, libraries, sites?
  • If user is a member of a teams – would all team content included?
  • It says “Files…” but would site pages be included? Or list items? Or list items attachments? Pages is something that people use to create wiki to share knowledge.
  • How long it takes for Microsoft 365 to start restricting results after Restricted SharePoint Search is enabled
  • How to deal with “You do not have the required license to perform this operation”

Here I’m going to answer the questions above.

So far I build a test scenario using my dev tenant that includes multiple collaborated users and content in the form of files, pages, list items and messages spreaded across multiple sites falling into different categories of Restricted SharePoint Search allowed content.

You do not have the required license…

If you are getting “You do not have the required license to perform this operation” when you are trying Get-SPOTenantRestrictedSearchMode or Get-PnPTenantRestrictedSearchMode – that means there is no Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses assigned to tenant yet. This feature – Restricted SharePoint Search – works only when at least one Copilot license is assigned to tenant.

… TBC

References

SharePoint Governance

Leave a reply

Governance in IT is establishing rules, policies, tools and practices that helps you manage and protect your enterprise resources. SharePoint governance (or wider – Collaboration governance) covers

  • resources ownership and lifecycle
  • users’ access to resources
  • compliance with your business standards
  • security of your data

SharePoint Governance: list of articles

References

Restricted SharePoint Search rationale

Leave a reply

Restricted SharePoint Search is a new (2024) Microsoft 365 feature that should help Copilot and general search results be more relevant, especially in large Microsoft 365 environments.

The problem background

When you have a really big number of sites – it is very difficult to keep them all in a well-managed state, e.g. to have reasonable (minimal) permissions provided to each site. So the typical situation (unfortunately) is: we have a lot of overshared sites. There are also a lot of ownerless sites where permissions are not managed. We know that search is security-trimmed, i.e. a user can get search results from content he/she already has access to. But with overshared sites – users get results they should not be able to see. With regular search experience – a user can see with his own eyes the source of the content he/she gets results from – so user can understand that results are coming from sites user should not have access to (overshared sites). But when it comes to AI-based search (Copilot) – user is getting answers, but he/she do not always know the source of that data.

So the problem is – we want to ensure Copilot is trained on a proper set of data and results are curated to users needs and access permissions. So for Copilot we really need to exclude from search scope such sites we are not sure content is valid, accurate and properly secured. We do not want users to get garbage or exposed sensitive information as an authoritative answer from Copilot.

The solution

This is where Restricted SharePoint Search feature should help, as with this feature your can restrict organization-wide search (and Copilot) to a curated list of SharePoint sites – “allowed sites” – public sites that passed attestation and where permissions are checked and data governance policies are applied, and content user work with on daily basis – his/her own documents and content shared with user directly (check details on Microsoft’s How does Restricted SharePoint Search work) – e.g. content user is supposed to have access to normally.

Excluded from search scope would be sites shared with user indirectly, e.g. something that was shared with everyone.

The root cause

Interesting, that with this feature Microsoft is not solving the real issue, but hiding (concealing) the real issue and just making Microsoft 365 to look more secure.

The real problem (root cause) is over-sharing data. But Microsoft already sold us SharePoint (and then Microsoft 365). And now Microsoft is trying to sell us Copilot, so they “solved” the over-sharing issue with “let us limit search” solution instead of “let’s fix oversharing”.

Note 1: Restricted SharePoint Search feature is free – i.e. it is included in standard Microsoft 365 license. Do not be confused with site access restriction policy – feature that require SharePoint Premium license and allows to restrict access to some SharePoint sites with specific groups only.

Note 2: I know that Microsoft is trying to address over-sharing issue as part of their SharePoint Premium (SharePoint Advanced Management) package, e.g. with AI Insights and Data access governance insights – reports that can help prevent oversharing by detecting sites that contain potentially overshared or sensitive content. With Manage content lifecycle we’d decrease amount of “garbage” or outdated content.
But SharePoint Advanced Management is licensed separately, when Restricted SharePoint Search is free.

Note 3: I know that users are an even more real problem because they tend to simplify and share information irresponsibly.

References

Dealing with Ownerless Groups in large Microsoft 365 environments

1 Reply

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.

Microsoft 365 admin center: Manage ownerless Microsoft 365 groups and teams

1 Reply

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

More on Microsoft 365 ownerless groups

Manage Microsoft 365 groups membership with PowerShell and Graph API

1 Reply

As SharePoint or Teams admin you manage Microsoft 365 groups (create, update, delete, manage membership etc.) having your admin role activated. I prefer PowerShell 7 and Microsoft.Graph PowerShell module, and I need an Azure registered app with “Group.ReadWrite.All” Microsoft Graph API delegated permission.

Some findings:

If a user was not a group member or group owner – and the user is added to the group members – this user will get notification “You’ve joined the <Group Name> group” via e-mail that comes from a group e-mail address.

When a user is added to the group owners (or elevated to group owner if user was a group member) – user does not get notification.

When a user was a group owner and now you are adding this user to the group members – user does not get notification.

All the actions are logged into Microsoft 365 audit log under your personal Id.

Script samples:

# This script is just a sample to demonstrate basic technique on getting, updating groups membership and deletion m365 groups with PowerShell and MS Graph
#
# please do not run this script as is, but update it based on your needs

# authentication with personal Id
#  app must have as minimum "Group.ReadWrite.All" Microsoft Graph API delegated permission
#  user must have SharePoint admin (or Teams admin) roles activated
Connect-MgGraph -ClientId $clientid -TenantId $tenantId 
Get-MgContext | Select-Object Scopes -ExpandProperty Scopes

# sample data
$groups = @()
$groups += [PSCustomObject]@{GroupId = '443d22ae-683a-4fe4-8875-7bd78227a026' }
$groups += [PSCustomObject]@{GroupId = 'e5805388-c18c-48c0-b42d-6223cf8f3d82' }

# Get Groups
foreach ($group in $groups) {
    Get-MgGroup -GroupId $group.GroupId
}

# add members to the group
$groupId = '443d22ae-683a-4fe4-8875-7bd78227a026'
$userId = 'df74e0d3-d78c-495b-b47a-549437d93cf7' # Adele
New-MgGroupMember -GroupId $groupId -DirectoryObjectId $userId

# add Owner to the group
$groupId = '443d22ae-683a-4fe4-8875-7bd78227a026'
$userId = 'eacd52fb-5ae0-45ec-9d17-5ded9a0b9756' # Megan
New-MgGroupOwner -GroupId $groupId -DirectoryObjectId $userId

# Delete group
$groupId = '443d22ae-683a-4fe4-8875-7bd78227a026'
Remove-MgGroup -GroupId $groupId

References

Microsoft 365 ownerless group policy to send more than 10,000 notifications

1 Reply

It is known that a single Microsoft Exchange account is not sending more than 10k emails per day.

It is also know that once activated – Microsoft 365 groups ownerless policy will be sending notifications for all groups in scope to specified number of group members within 24 hours.

The question is: what if there are more than 10,000 notifications to send (e.g. 4,000 ownerless groups and the policy is configured to send notification to 3 members per group – that gives us 12,000 notifications to send)? Would the policy send 10k notifications and the rest 2k notifications the next day?

I’m conducting an experiment. I created 10k groups in my lab tenant with one owner and 3 random members. Then I configured a policy that is sending notification to a 3 most active members (in this case – random members). And then I made all these groups ownerless by deleting the single owner Id from Azure AD (Microsoft Entra).

Here is what I got from users perspective:

useruser groups
number		got messages
day 1		got messages
day 2		got messages
total
1 Roger50121374
2 Dick50391349
3 Bob51083412
4 Bapu49081376
5 Stas49961437
6 David49591377
total10325

Here is what audit log says:

Events “OwnerlessGroupNotified” day 1: 4949
Events “OwnerlessGroupNotified” day 2: 95
Events “OwnerlessGroupNotified” total: 5044
Each event details says 3 members were notified.

It seems like groups are selected by policy in random order.

Massive E-mails sending was started 43 minutes after midnight UTC

“OwnerlessGroupNotified” were logged at the rate of
1925 events during 1-st hour,
2029 events during 2-nd hour,
785 events during 3-rd hour,
176 events during 4-th hour,
26 events during 5-24 th hour,
95 events during next 25-48 hours
so max rate was one event every 3 seconds in the beginning (or 1 e-mail per second) …

TBC…

Microsoft 365 retention policies: Static vs Adaptive scope

Leave a reply

WIP…

Adaptive scopes are good, but what if both policies are implemented? Which one wins?
The scenario for two policies might be: static retention policy is implemented as default retention policy for all sites, and if site require different retention or deletion – it should fall under one of the adaptive scopes and an adaptive retention policy will be applied.

Implementing Microsoft 365 group expiration policy in large companies

2 Replies

This post is dedicated to one specific subject: implementing Microsoft 365 groups lifecycle (expiration) policy in large Microsoft 365 environments.

But this post is also a part of a bigger problem – dealing with ownerless resources in Large Microsoft 365 environments. Please refer to the umbrella post.

Scenario

You administer a large Microsoft 365 environment. Let say you have 100k users or more, 50K or more sites. Environment is not new, so after some years you have a lot of ownerless groups and sites (thousands probably), and a lot of inactive groups and sites (probably tens of thousands). You are getting more and more ownerless groups – hundreds each month. You are thinking of stopping bleeding and cleaning this up…

Implementing Microsoft 365 groups expiration policy

If you are thinking of activating in an existing environment – you would probably have a spike – all the old groups will be subject to policy. The ide is to avoid situation when a specific person – group owner will get dozens of email. It would be better if a person will receieve, let say one email per week.

Here is my 4 possible approaches to avoid this spike, distribute notifications evenly across the time and ease the pain:

By changing Group Lifetime

You would need to change the policy every, e.g. week or month, specifying group lifetime in days starting with maximum period. Consider
– calculate number of days between the oldest group created an today, plus 35 days – it’ll be your first “group lifetime”
– activate the policy with this number of days in “group lifetime” – and within a week you will get notifications on the oldest group/groups
– after a week or two – change the “group lifetime” decreasing it by e.g. 30-60 days and reactivate the policy… and so on

You can easily calculate it all and choose your pace depending on how many groups you have to renew, how much time you need to clean-up. You got the idea.

Downside – in the email notification it will be said “otherwise the group will be deleted on …”, but you joggling with lifetime period – so these dates might confuse users

By renewing groups as admin

As an admin, you can use PowerShell “Reset-PnPMicrosoft365GroupExpiration” or graph API “POST /groups/{id}/renew“ to renew any group.

So depending on total number of groups, number of active/inactive groups, number of ownerless groups in your organization – you can come up with a strategy, using one or more of the following techniques:

  • renew all active and known and important groups (build list of groups to re-activate based on your own criteria) and then trigger the policy
  • build list of definitely inactive groups and renew all other groups
  • split groups into chunks and every day or week (depending on numbers) renew groups in a chunk… after that you can activate groups expiration policy, the policy will be triggered against small number of groups every day/week (with this trick you would avoid policy triggering against large number of groups and sending thousands of emails at one)

By sending customized e-mails to users

Another technique to avoid surge in your e-mail system (and most importantly – avoid sudden influx of support requests) – you can send emails to group owners with a link to renew a group. Surely you’d need to build your custom solution for that, but this does not seem like a complicated task. Some PowerShell scripting – and you are good.

“Renew group” link would look like:
https://account.activedirectory.windowsazure.com/Group/RenewGroup?tenantId=<tenantId>&id=<groupId>
where <tenantId> is tenant id and <groupId> is group Id. So with PowerShell you’d just pull groups in question, their owners and send email with the link dynamically built. Consider spreading this activity across the time to avoid spikes.

By sending users to the groups page

Probably the easies option to smooth the expiration policy implementation is to send group owners to a Microsoft “Groups I own” page – where they could renew or delete their groups. The page is:

Groups I Own (https://myaccount.microsoft.com/groups/groups-i-own)

The downside is – the policy should be in active state (otherwise owners will not see when the group is expiring and option to renew it). So consider a maximum lifetime period in policy, then you’d decrease this period).

Groups expiration policy technical details

Check this KBA for a deep dive into the groups lifecycle policy technical details.

Related content