Forum Discussion

Brass Contributor

Jan 03, 2018

Retention Policys and Sharepoint

We have enabled the Office 365 retention policy so it applies to all services in Office 365. Now my sharepoint guys said he get an error when trying to delete a whole site. He could do it by using Sh...

hybrid

SharePoint Online

jcgonzalezmartin

MVP

Jan 03, 2018

First of all, don't use SharePoint Designer :-)...secondly, if you have applied a retention policy to the site is totally expected that you cannot remove the site. If you want to remove the site, then you should disable the retention policy

Jesper Stein

Brass Contributor

Jan 03, 2018

Hi. Thanks for your reply, I guess I knew that :)

But is there any "White Paper" or "Best practice" guidelines?

An idea was that when removing a site, SP admin would request the Retention Policy Admin to exclude the site from the retention policy.....

Dean_Gross
Silver Contributor
Jan 09, 2018
There are some powershell cmdlets that will give you the ability to do some things that you can't do through the UI, see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt587093(v=exchg.160).aspx.

I don't know if they will help you do what you want to do, but it may be worth testing out.
Ian Moran
Steel Contributor
Jan 09, 2018
I reported a bug in this behaviour last year where it was impossible to exclude a site from a retention policy once defined - and therefore impossible to delete the site, even if that site was empty. The UI is there to do this but it never worked. Also be very careful with Preservation Lock !!