Forum Discussion
Retention Policies and SharePoint sites
The reason why you put Office 365 Groups on retention is to ensure that the content in all the resources owned by the group is kept for a certain period.
When a group passes 30 days post-deletion, the Azure Active Directory object that represents the group is removed. This effectively breaks the link that ties all the group resources together. At the same time, instructions go to the associated workloads (like SharePoint and Exchange) to say that the group no longer exists. The workloads then check whether any retention holds exist. If they do, the content is held until the hold elapses. If not, the content is removed using the workload's normal processing (for instance, the mailbox is cleaned up by the Exchange Mailbox Folder Assistant).
Content under retention can always be accessed by a content search and export.
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.
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