Retention Policies and SharePoint sites

NZTECH Probably a remnant policy (not visible in the UI) is blocking this action.

Go into the Security & Compliance Powershell module and run:

Get-CCRetentionCompliancePolicy | select Name,Guid

(I have the 'CC' command prefix set on connection). Deliver this overview to Microsoft Support and they can check if there are still other policy Guids present in the system which are faulty and then proceed to remove them.

I had great help BTW! Good luck

Also having the same issues= as others here and no matter what I do I cannot delete the Removed Team sites out of SharePoint Management.

I have removed all Retention Policies and Groups associated.

Cannot remove site via Powershell either.

I have a ticket logged with Microsoft and are struggling to resolve this.

I too am facing this issue. We've turned off retention on SharePoint and I believe o365 groups. I can delete regular (non associated o365) team sites. However anything that was marked with office 365 group I can't delete. In some cases the o365 group no longer exists (but I don't have the yellow bar prompt saying that would stop deletion). Just the regular compliance policy bar.

I am also facing this issue. Are there any updates?

I'm glad I found this thread. This is exactly what I need to solve as well. 

I've noticed that my policies are always in a state of pending. It's been about 6 months since we put this retention policy on - and it's still pending!?

Name : Office 365 Global Retention CCC
DistributionStatus : Pending

TonyRedmond 

Jonathan Klein-Wiele I've flagged the issue (again). Nothing much will happen until the new year. I'll keep an eye on what transpires.

Hi together,

just wanted to let know we have the exact same issue. From support I got the feedback that Microsoft is aware but she didn't say she is working on a fix about hat.

Main problem is that sites can't excluded from a "general" retention policy.

I was successful in delete some sites by support but we have now over 1000 stale sites and should delete most of them.

 TonyRedmond maybe you can rise again this problem at the developers at microsoft, we don't seem to be the only ones having this. In EXO it works just to add the Mailbox to exclusion in the retention policy, in SPO when adding a site there comes an error after the sync period. Some months ago it wasn't even possible to select a site there, now at least the selection is possible but saving doesn't work.

Thanks!

Scot Bickell Sorry. Zero idea.

That's great!

As long as I have your "ear", so to speak, I have a post in the SharePoint community that no one seems to have an answer for. Do you know any SharePoint Online gurus that might know the answer to this:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Incoming-Webhook-Webpart-How-to-manage-the-cards/m-p/979124

Sorry this is off topic for Office 365 admin issues, but I'll take whatever exposure I can get. 

Scot Bickell  Yep. I see errors in the retention policy.

I think the issue is that the site URLs held in the properties of the retention policy are hard coded and are not updated when a site rename occurs.

I'll flag the issue to Microsoft.

TonyRedmond 

1) Identify which site you want to change the URL on.   If it has the yellow box in the properties telling you that there is a compliance policy blocking the deletion, then the URL Edit link seems to be greyed out, and you can't click on it to initiate a URL change.  

2) In the Retention policy that covers SharePoint sites, add the URL to the Excluded sites list and wait around 15-30 minutes,

3) check the site properties and the retention policy warning should be gone and the Edit button should be clickable. 

4)  Change the site URL

5)  Add the new site URL to the retention policy list of Excluded list.  Upon saving the policy, you might get the Client Error.   

6) Allow time for whatever indexing or sync needs to happen between the retention policies and any url address changes.  (In my case 24 hours was sufficient, which I realized today  --11/14/19.)

I would imagine that it is not normally necessary to exclude the site in the retention policy after a URL change, unless you have a good reason to not retain the data, or if you actually want to delete the site.

If you try to add the new URL to the list of Excluded sites immediately after the change, you might get the Client Error showing the 500 server error in the details.   After 24 hours, I did not get the error and was able to add the new URL to the list of Excluded sites.

I am guessing that this is because it takes time for the retention policy to sync or reindex the sites in the SPO tenancy.   Perhaps in your environment, the sync/indexing happens much sooner than in ours and that is why you could not replicate my issue. 

Scot Bickell  I tried to replicate the problem you experienced and couldn't. Can you give the exact steps to reproduce?

In saying this, I acknowledge that some moving parts are shifting in the service and what you see might not be what I see...

Looks like the engineers who worked on the site URL renaming feature have not been talking to the engineers who work on retention policies:

I wanted to test out the https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/change-site-address that allows changing a site's URL.    The https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/change-site-address mentions a list of Effects, but they might want to add to that list of effects to include Retention Policy interactions.

In order to be able to edit the URL, I had to add the site to the list of Excluded sites in the Retention policy.  Once the policy took effect, I was able to edit the URL.  

After the URL has been changed, the old URL still shows in the list of excluded sites, and if you try to change it and enter the new URL, you get an error upon saving the policy:

The Client Error message: 

No exact match was found. The URL "https://...sharepoint.com/sites/....  may be invalid, you don't have permission to access this location, or the location is not indexed by Search.

Details show a 500 exception

Request: /api/RetentionCompliance Status code: 500 Exception: Microsoft.Exchange.PswsClient.PswsException Diagnostic information: {Version:17.00.3679.019,Environment:NCUPROD,DeploymentId: removed for privacy,InstanceId:WebRole_IN_1,SID:removed for privacy,CID:removed for privacy} Time: 2019-11-13T18:18:49.8887659Z

It is also possible that I need to allow time for things to reindex under the new URL, so I will try it again in about 24 hours. 

SjoerdV Or for an independent view, https://www.petri.com/teams-private-channels

Scot Bickell I spoke about the problem to Mark-Kashman of Microsoft. Flagging it here for him to get some context.

HI SjoerdV, 

Thank you for the update.   

I have an update on my attempts to remove the site I've been trying to delete.   

Here's a complete timeline :  
10/31/2019 - 7 pm EDT:   Unable to delete site due to retention policy issue, but unable to see any active policies that would apply to the site.  Continued to look and research for the next two days.

11/2/2019 -  2 pm EDT:  Created new custom retention policy (illustrated in previous post)

11/3/2019  - 3 pm EST:  Still unable to delete site -  Changed custom retention policy status to Off & still unable to delete.

11/4/2019  - 2 pm EST  Still unable to delete site.  Continue researching this. 

11/5/2019 - about 8:45 am EST  (Today)  -  Removed custom retention policy.

11/5/2019  about 8:46 am EST - Saw that that the only yellow warning on site was the group not found warning: 

11/5/2019  8:47 am EST - Successfully deleted site and it now shows in Deleted sites listing.  

I wish I had attempted to check on the status of the site before removing the policy, so I am unsure if more time just needed to pass since turning the retention policy off, or if removing the policy did something to jiggle loose any policies previously associated with the site.   This at least tells me I can delete a site, even if it becomes orphaned from the originally connected Group.    I'll try that out the next time I run into this. 

Good luck to the engineers who have to fix this. I don't envy their task on such intricate integrations between all these Office 365 products.  

Scot Bickell TonyRedmond I just got informed by the MS Support Team that Microsoft is working on a fix but that it will take some time because of the complexity of the problem. They do understand the issue, so I reckon we just have to wait a bit longer. 

I was mixed up on who I was agreeing with and held the opinion that, "As it is right now SharePoint and Retention is still not a very 'agreeable' subject in my book." I thought it was TonyRedmond  . I see it was SjoerdV 

Sorry about that.  There is a longer post that is awaiting moderation approval.  Until that shows, this reply may not make sense. 

Hello SjoerdV 

I just wanted to chime in on this conversation because we are facing the same issues. 

A user created either a Group from Outlook or a Team in MS Teams. I am not sure which, but whichever it was, it also created a SharePoint site. It was created as an experiment and then they later deleted the Group or Team, or both -- more than 30 days ago.  

When this site is selected in the SP admin center, there are two notices above the properties pane:  

If we try to delete the site, we get the popup "Can't delete site"  message with the details of "A compliance policy is currently blocking this site deletion"

For lack of a better term, I am currently calling this site an "Orphaned" site.

The Default data governance publishing policy, which applied to Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Office 365 Groups is currently off.  Separate policies for SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange were created six or seven months ago.   The policy covering SharePoint sites remains published, but it was edited about one month ago to turn off SharePoint sites in the "Locations applied" section.  I am guessing this effectively turns off retention for all SharePoint sites, and was done so that we could clean up some sites that needed to be removed.  I wasn't the admin that did this, so I am just assuming that after removing the sites, the plan was to turn it back on.  Some sites were able to be removed, but some still could not be deleted, so the retention policy for SharePoint sites was not re-enabled.

I also created a new policy more than 24 hours ago with specific sites  (one of which is the "Orphaned" site that we can't delete.   I don't want the policy to delete the sites for me, so the settings look like this:

I waited 24 hours, but the site is still flagged as having a compliance policy that prevents deletion.  We don't have any other published policies that cover SharePoint.  (It is very possible I don't understand how to best create a policy for sites that we want to remove by setting it to a 1 day retention period. )

I am in agreement with TonyRedmond    SjoerdV   concerning his opinion regarding the mechanisms for SharePoint & Retention.   It seems like documentation on how to do it properly is lacking. If it is out there, I'd love to see it.  I find the process arduous and difficult to follow. 

In the future, we will follow the advice in the post about "What would have been better...", but in the meantime, is there any procedure in a doc or technet post that we could follow and not have to contacting support and open a ticket?  

SjoerdV   I don't have anything particular to share right now. I have a thread going with some folks in the SharePoint team that I hope to pursue at Microsoft Ignite next week. The problem of course is that the conference might become chaotic and I lose all sense of reality, in which case I probably won't get this done.