Group SharePoint Sites with O365 Groups that doesn't exist

[Bhavpreet Bains]

Hello,

I have noticed that there are quite a few Group sites in our tenant for which group doesn't exist. I am not sure if it's a normal behavior but I do have some questions.

- Under what circumstances, can it happen? My guess is group got deleted but site didn't. Shouldn't the site be deleted with group in that case?

- Since those are the group sites, I can't pull who is the owner unless, I have the group. Is there any other way, I can get the ownership information?

- Is there a way to re-associate these group sites to some group? One of them needs to be a MS Teams site.

- Is there a way to prevent something like this happening in future?

Thank you.

Bhavpreet Bains

[#2]

I think you are right and what propably happened is that the Groups were not deleted properly causing you have some orphaned sites in your tenant. In regards of how to recover the Group / Ownership, I'm afraid that's not possible Today

[#3]

Thanks, Juan!

Is there a way to avoid something like this happening in the future?

For the current sites, is there a way to determine the owner? In SharePoint Admin center, for any of the group sites, Admin just says Office 365 group owners. Powershell, give owner as blank.

Lastly, if the user wants the site be MS Teams so that they can have conversation. Is there a way to do so? 

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately there is no way to prevent something that should not happen :-(. In regards of a way to determine the owner, I'm afraid it's not possible because the former Group is the owner...try to add a new owner to each site instead.

In regards of your question about adding a Team, I think there is not a supported way to do this since your sites are orphaned sites not linked to Groups so you cannot potentially create Teams based on those Groups that don't exist anymore....best you can do here in my opinion is to create a copy of the contents of the sites, delete them and recreate your Groups

[#5]

Thank you, Juan for the insight.

[#6]

How did you confirm that the Group does not exist? have you looked in the Group recycle bin?

You can look for deleted groups with the Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup cmdlet

[#7]

To confirm the group doesn't exist, I checked all existing groups in portal and recycle bin. Apart from that, I also wrote a powershell script that check sharepoint url to search through all the group's sharepoint site url.