Deletion of an SharePoint website with an adaptive scope

What you are running into is by design in Microsoft Purview. When a site falls out of the scope of a retention policy or retention label published through an adaptive scope, Microsoft 365 places it in a 30-day grace period before the retention settings are fully lifted. The point of that grace period is to prevent administrators from accidentally removing content from protection and then deleting it immediately. Unfortunately, the exclude option that you have seen in the admin center is indeed only available for static scopes, not adaptive scopes, so there is no “official” supported way to combine adaptive scoping with selective exclusions that bypass the grace timer.

The practical approaches people use today are either to move those unwanted sites into their own dedicated static scope retention policy, where you can apply excludes as needed, or to create a temporary parallel retention policy that targets only the sites you actually want to remove and then lift that policy once you are ready. The adaptive scope remains your best option for handling the bulk of automatically created sites. Still, for the handful of sites that you know need to be deleted, you essentially have to treat them differently.

In other words, you cannot retain the complete automation of the adaptive scope and simultaneously avoid the grace period when you remove sites from scope. Microsoft has not yet provided a mechanism for that combination. If avoiding the 30-day grace is a hard requirement, your only supported path is to put the sites you want to exclude into a separate static scope retention policy and then exclude them there.

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