Forum Discussion
Groups Lifecycle / Archiving / Moving
Certainly you can close down a group by removing all users from the membership list and hiding it from the GAL. In effect, you put the group into an "inactive" status. Later on, you can remove the group if you don't want to keep it around, perhaps by running a PowerShell script to look for inactive groups and deleting those who are found. Microsoft is due to introduce a policy-based method to do this by assigning groups a lifecycle period. When a group's lifecycle period expires, the owner receives a message to renew the "lease" on the group and extend its lifetime. If they want, the owner can decide to have the group removed at that point.
If you put a group into inactive status and discover later on that you need to resurrect the group, you unhide the group to reveal it in the GAL and add whoever needs to access the group to the membership list.
Juan Carlos González recently published advice similar to Tony's but with additional elements:
- Remove all owners from the group’s membership list.
- Remove all users from the group’s membership list.
- Add a new group owner. Ideally, this should be a special compliance administration account instead of a tenant administrator.
- Ensure that the group is private so that its documents stay invisible to Delve or other searches.
- Block email by changing the group primary SMTP address and set RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled property to $True to stop Exchange Online accepting any external email sent to the group.
- Hide the group so that it does not appear in the GAL and other address lists
This can be found at https://reoffice365.com/is-it-possible-to-archive-any-office-365-group-not-required-in-use-anymore-92bd5083b8bf
This is precisely the list that I publish in Chapter 15 of "Office 365 for IT Pros", which is what JCM notes in his blog...
- Thanks for the pointer to your book; sorry I missed JCM's reference to it!
No worries. Quite a lot of people have never heard of the book or believe that they might need such a book (after all, everything's on the web - right?), but we like pushing the boundaries of knowledge about Office 365 forward in the form of a living book and that's all that really matters...