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Sudeep Vemulapalli's avatar
Sudeep Vemulapalli
Copper Contributor
Oct 04, 2016

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

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!!

  • 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.
    • jcgonzalezmartin's avatar
      jcgonzalezmartin
      MVP
      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
    • Antony Taylor's avatar
      Antony Taylor
      Steel Contributor
      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?
      • Drew Madelung's avatar
        Drew Madelung
        MVP

        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"

         

    • Steve Goodman's avatar
      Steve Goodman
      MVP

      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. 

      • TonyRedmond's avatar
        TonyRedmond
        MVP

        We can solve issues for Office 365 Groups because it supports PowerShell... Now Yammer... that's a completely different matter!

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