Forum Discussion
Force delete Group Site Collection after Group Deleted?
Jason Gould : did you find out if it was happening due to ediscovery retention policies ? And site will delete once retention expires?
poojac19 No. I've been dealing with Microsoft Support, multiple escalations, and they still can't fix the issue. They were only able to delete some sites for me. But sharepoint sites both old and new keep saying they can't be deleted due to a "compliance policy". I've completely disabled all retention policies. Deleted them. Recreated them. Made sure no policies were applied to sharepoint sites. Tried to add certain sites as excluded. I've tried everything.
There are no ediscovery cases in my tenant.
It's honestly beyond annoying at this point.
Jason Gould Did you get any resolution from Microsoft on this? Currently dealing with the exact same problem and they seem mystified by it :-/
Here is how I remove modern sites from "deleted sites" with power shell
1. Install SharePoint Online Management Shell
2. Connect-SPOService (enter your site management url (https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com)
3. Remove-SPODeletedSite -Identity https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/delete-site-collection
Just went to the same issue. You need to delete the Office 365 groups in two places. If you delete online in the Admin Center->Groups, you still need to go inside Portal Azure and permanent delete the Groups there. Portal Azure ->Azure Active Directory -> Groups -> Deleted Groups -> Send them to SPACE :)
You give a day or two and the sites will be deleted. :)
This whole issue has nothing to do with ediscovery policies.. crazy!
FYI, our tenant still has issues. I get an email every day telling me that they are waiting on the escalation team to offer some form of input. Every site says there is a compliance policy in place and can't be deleted. Doesn't matter what I do. All retention and label policies were deleted.
I'm pretty sure that somehow when I deleted an old retention policy (without disabling it first) that it somehow wasn't fully removed. It was a 7yr retention policy on email and sharepoint. Of course the policy doesn't appear in any powershell commands, but it's the only policy that I had previously and is the only logical explanation.
I've tried EVERYTHING. Nothing works and Microsoft still can't fix it.
Jason Gould - I'm in the same boat as you. I have a single site collection where we dump all of our traditional team collaboration sites (as sub-sites) and that Site Collection has a lock on it. I ran through hours and hours of Support and they could never get it fixed. To this day i still can't delete any sub-sites under this one site collection and I'm beyond frustrated that NOT ONE person at Microsoft could resolve this issue. We ran all kinds of scripts to output metadata, i bounced between teams, SharePoint/Compliance and Security. Frustrating to say the least!!
Greg Jones I was having the same frustrating issue but was able to get it resolved by Microsoft support. Here was there explanation:
Hi James, I just got an update from the Engineering team that they were able to remove the hold that they found already. Please check or try again after 24 hours. Let me know how it goes. Thanks. Regards, David Office 365 Next Team SupportNaturally their explanation doesn't help at all but you might try referencing my ticket number and with any luck the'll have some internal notes on how they resolved it on their end. Ticket number 13659489.
Good luck!
