DL management

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Hi All,

 

Looking for some pointers in DL management. We have approx 8000 DL’s in our tenant. Some now redundant and some still very much in use. The challenge I’ve got currently is the business own the DL’s rather than central IT but as a result of this model it’s become difficult for us to initiate a clear out as a general house keeping task .... users maybe don’t want to make the decision to delete even if unused or the original owner has left the business etc. 

 

I’d love to find a way of automating the DL clean up using something like flow / SharePoint lists etc to maybe query with the DL owner if it’s still required.

 

with that in mind though I thought I’d ask the question here to get other 365 admins opinions on how they best approach this task?

 

 

1 Reply
SharePoint \ Flow for this seems to be ambitious.

As an IT we should come up with facts and numbers, based on actual data. Present it to the business along with the decision.

Example:
>DLs not used in next 6month\1year to be deleted.
>Message trace to find out when was the last time an email was sent to those DLs.
>Keep a script to do that every 7 days, so that you can build up that evidence.
>And end of the 6th month you have all you need to prove that this can go.

Lastly ask your users to move away from DLs and upgrade to O365 groups and use the expiry feature.

Configure the expiration policy for Office 365 groups:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/users-groups-roles/groups-lifecycle

Office 365 Group Expiration Policy
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/office-365-group-expiration-policy-8d253fe5-0e09-4b3c-8b5e-...

FIM Distribution List Expiration time:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/58cf4c95-bf4e-4d80-97ca-b469ff6a2b34/fim-distribut...

Regards,

Satyajit