Can someone please let me know if the content gets deleted when a user who is a group owner leaves the company or his O365 license gets unaissigned? Will the data be deleted? Or will it stay forever? Thank you in advance!!

There is no way to recover SharePoint data once the group has been deleted. If you want to recover files for groups without owners you will need to add a user as an owner of the group to access/move/copy the files. Here is a script from the Office 365 for IT Pro book to find out which groups do not have owners:# Find out which groups do not have owners $groups = Get-UnifiedGroup ForEach ($G in $Groups) { If ($G.ManagedBy -Ne $Null)  { $GoodGroups = $GoodGroups + 1 } Else {  Write-Host "Warning! The" $G.DisplayName "has no owners" $BadGroups = $BadGroups + 1  } }Write-Host $GoodGroups "groups are OK but" $BadGroups "groups lack owners"

When the Office 365 groups owner leaves the company the group remains in the tenant. You should ask your Office 365 admin to add a new Group admin to the orphaned group. Another tip might be to always assign more than one group admin to a group.

Funny... this script looks very similar (if not identical) to the script described in Chapter 9 of "Office 365 for IT Pros", where it was originally published in late May 2016. I think I posted the code to the old Yammer-based Office 365 network too in response to a script written by Eric Zenz of Microsoft, which took a different approach to solving the problem. All of this happened around the time that Dale and I were chatting about his session to the SPTechCon in Boston in June. That session is available online at http://www.slideshare.net/dmadelung/office365-groups-from-the-ground-up-sptechcon-boston (29 June). It is a nice deck that others might be interested in seeing. I've no great objection to people sharing scripts, but I do think that the original work should be acknowledged. Example from Office 365 for IT Pros

Be sure that you get the latest update (it's available now on the site dated 5 October) because Chapter 9 received a work-over after Ignite. It is now 72 pages of (mostly) goodness about all aspects of Office 365 Groups. Keeping up is relatively simple. Spend some time every day to track what's happening and then write it down. Then think about it. Iterate...

We have been discussing this same topic on another thread...content gets not deleted when a user leaves the group no matter if he/she is an owner or not...obviously the situation where he/she is the only owner has to been treated as described by Martina

O365 Groups and its related content (Plan, Files, etc.) when Group Owner leaves the organization?

24 Replies

Martina Grom
MVP
Oct 05, 2016
When the Office 365 groups owner leaves the company the group remains in the tenant. You should ask your Office 365 admin to add a new Group admin to the orphaned group. Another tip might be to always assign more than one group admin to a group.
- Steve Goodman
  MVP
  Oct 06, 2016
  It will be interesting to see how this is approached when Yammer + Office 365 groups work together.
  
  The equivalent user experience in Yammer can allow a user to self-nominate themselves as admin if it becomes orphaned. That approach may work well for social-style Office 365 groups, but may not be so appropriate to others. However it keeps the administrative effort required to a minimum.
  
  Another consideration for scripts to detect "orphaned" groups is that sometimes an account is disabled but not immediately removed. It's reasonably common practice for the account to be kept around for a short period of time before being removed from the tenant.
  - Martina Grom
    MVP
    Feb 05, 2017
    what I understood from the architectural perspective if you connect Yammer group to Office 365 group you'll get the behaviour of the O365 group. http://fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap#I-72468
- Antony Taylor
  Iron Contributor
  Oct 05, 2016
  Hi Martina,
  
  Currently I know that there is no full soft-delete function tied into groups which is a big roadblock to deployment in some environments however if it's possible to recover say just the OneDrive/SharePoint portion of the group currently today?
  - Martina Grom
    MVP
    Apr 17, 2017
    ...and soft delete for groups is here. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Restore-a-deleted-Office-365-Group-b7c66b59-657a-4e1a-8aa0-8163b1f4eb54?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&fromAR=1
- jcgonzalezmartin
  MVP
  Oct 05, 2016
  We have been discussing this same topic on another thread...content gets not deleted when a user leaves the group no matter if he/she is an owner or not...obviously the situation where he/she is the only owner has to been treated as described by Martina

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O365 Groups and its related content (Plan, Files, etc.) when Group Owner leaves the organization?

24 Replies

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