Forum Discussion
Delete Teams from Admin Interface not as efficient as from UI
Hi,
I just realized that if I delete a Team from admin interface, you can still see it in from user interface. But when deleting Team from user interface, it disappear from both admin and user interfaces. See Capture below.
Is there a "Good way" to properly remove a Team ?
Beyond this, if you want to permanently delete a Team, how to achieve this ? Until now, the best way for me was to :
- remove the Team from UI
- remove the Group from Deleted Groups
- remove the SP Site permanently
Thank you for you answers.
- Hi ,
Hope you are well. Official documentation doesn’t specify an optimal way, It outlines both the IT admin led way via the TAC
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/archive-or-delete-a-team
And the owner/user led way in the Team
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/delete-a-team-c386f91b-f7e6-400b-aac7-8025f74f8b41
In my experience most in the community typically recommends the user led way as like you said it is perceived to be cleaner
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Delete-Team/m-p/269752
Whilst others recommend Powershell
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/teams/remove-team?view=teams-ps
And others the Graph
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Teams-Developer/Deleting-a-Team-via-Graph-API/m-p/729152
As you will see from the Graph conversation removing a Team on the back end takes time and the team can hang around. This is how it is designed but the confusion resulting from the persistence is why deleting them in the client is typically recommend over a back end delete. However an IT admin may not have the ability to access that team. So you may want to do back end but a little bit of education is needed. Also the admin needs to define an approach to deletion as in simply delete or archive then delete, also can it be simply deleted due to retention, legal hold etc
The way you are permanently deleting things is typically the way people do it. Team, Group, Site. I also see Group delete then Group hard delete then site. I would also recommend keeping the 30 day soft delete period in just in case recovery is ever needed.
Hope that helps to answer your question! It is largely interpretive and working it out is part of your Teams lifecycle policy!
Best, Chris
3 Replies
To add some additional detail to what Chris said: It all revolves around the whole concept of Groups/Teams, the fact that they are composed of "loosely coupled" parts across several workloads. Thus when you delete one component, all the other workloads need to be "notified" about the deletion. Usually this should happen synchronously, but it's not uncommon for this process to fail, which then means you have to wait for the asynchronous/background task to synchronize the changed between the workloads. And you have the client angle as well, the UI is designed to give you the impression that the action was completed immediately, while the actual status on the backend might still be unchanged.
Regardless of where you perform the action though, the result should be the same, given enough time.
- Completely agree with you, therefore I've waited some time to see if my Teams backend actions were propagated to UI, without success (too impatient ?).
It confirms that for the time, there's no governance about Teams Deletion, no "perfect way". But I'm sure it will come 🙂
- Hi ,
Hope you are well. Official documentation doesn’t specify an optimal way, It outlines both the IT admin led way via the TAC
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/archive-or-delete-a-team
And the owner/user led way in the Team
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/delete-a-team-c386f91b-f7e6-400b-aac7-8025f74f8b41
In my experience most in the community typically recommends the user led way as like you said it is perceived to be cleaner
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Delete-Team/m-p/269752
Whilst others recommend Powershell
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/teams/remove-team?view=teams-ps
And others the Graph
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Teams-Developer/Deleting-a-Team-via-Graph-API/m-p/729152
As you will see from the Graph conversation removing a Team on the back end takes time and the team can hang around. This is how it is designed but the confusion resulting from the persistence is why deleting them in the client is typically recommend over a back end delete. However an IT admin may not have the ability to access that team. So you may want to do back end but a little bit of education is needed. Also the admin needs to define an approach to deletion as in simply delete or archive then delete, also can it be simply deleted due to retention, legal hold etc
The way you are permanently deleting things is typically the way people do it. Team, Group, Site. I also see Group delete then Group hard delete then site. I would also recommend keeping the 30 day soft delete period in just in case recovery is ever needed.
Hope that helps to answer your question! It is largely interpretive and working it out is part of your Teams lifecycle policy!
Best, Chris
