Forum Discussion
Groups Lifecycle / Archiving / Moving
Hi there, we're planning on introducing Office 365 Groups as the modern alternative to network drives, and shared mailboxes (and so on). One additional aspect we wanted to tackle was project related workspaces.
If we were to allow users to create groups for organizational project how would you suggest we should handle the full lifecycle of a project related group?
What happens to a group after the project is finished, or say already a year has passed since the completion?
How do you archive this group? Do you just leave it there for referencing purposes, or would you somehow try to rollover the data (most likely files) to the appropriate deparments group (how to do it technically?) ?
And alternative would be to share a folder from the departments group with project members, but then you'd lose all the other benefits of a group.
I'm interested to hear your ideas on this topic!
- I'm not sure what the official response is but depending on how much sprawl you have you could design some kind of PowerShell script to do the following functions;
-Remove/Change Membership
-Hide from Global Address List (helps with groups search sprawl)
-Change Display name to some kind of Archive Prefix
I'd prefer a microsoft supported method to manage the lifecycle of these though properly.You could easily take the script posted at https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Check-for-obsolete-Office-c0020a42 (to identify obsolete groups) and modify any group deemed to be obsolete or suitable for archiving as you want.
- Change the name
- Hide the group from address lists
- Remove all the members
- Send a note to members to tell them that the group is now closed
You don't need to delete the group because you might want its content for compliance purposes.
Hello, so the remove members and hide group is still the goto-archiving-method?
Do I see this correctly, that a user that wants to restore access to group, needs to ask an administrator to add him again?
Isnt there a way to reduce the group clutter but still grant easy access to "archived" groups when needed?
We have exactly the same question.
Our thoughts so far:
- exporting all file data to an on-premise drive
- exporting maildata as pst files
--> all manually
But what about:
- metadata
- automating archiving (keyword: revision-proof?)
- lost searchability etc., as Ivan54 already mentioned
Additional point:
- how to transform exisiting SharePoints to groups?
Hi,
I have been testing using Discovery Hold for groups no longer needed. This works fine when testing what data we can recover from a content search, ie conversations, one drive files and one note items. However once the group is deleted, how do we search for the data? I have tried email address for the conversations, but that doesn't work. One drive data can be retrieved by adding the url, but what happens if that url is reused as the group no longer exists?
I want the ability to put all groups on hold whilst we await a mature backup solution for groups.
Rgds
Lee
There's no soft-delete functionality available for Office 365 Groups today. When you delete a group, it is immediately removed from the system and cannot be retrieved. As you can imagine, this is not a great situation to be in and Microsoft has committed to providing soft-delete capabilities in the future. The situation is a little complicated because of the links that might exist for a group between Exchange, SharePoint, Planner, Dynamics CRM, and Power BI (not to mention AAD), so I suspect that this is why it is taking a while for the feature to emerge.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for the quick answer, your help is always appreciated. I was aware that groups do not have a soft deletion option, but was led to believe that you were able to put the group mailbox and one drive for business on Discovery Hold, so that you can run a content search to retrieve the items if the group is deleted? If that is not the case, then I will hold back on the roll out of groups in our tenant, until I have a solution to this pronlem.
Rgds
Lee
As has been pointed out, there are many complications to address. For us, the ability to move the document library to a SPO library archive - we use a document center site - from Groups would be a big help.
We've been using team site (and project sites) for years and would love to use Groups instead, For that to truly work for us we'd need to be able to create our own Group document library template that makes use of our custom content types which also requires access to our metadata store. Our use case would be - create a group for the project, inviting all relevant internal and external users and then archiving the documents (by moving to SPO as above) and perhaps email.
Email isn't as huge an issue since we set it up so that group members get emails from the group so the messages can be archived that way.
We're not subject to regulatory compliance so we don't face those issues.
Of course, the easy way is to do nothing - keep the group and allow users to either leave or just remove the group from their Outlook clients and perhaps hide them in OneDrive. that will get messy after a while of course.
- I am also desiring this feature. Would like to be able to make a group "inactive" which would allow me to choose where to put files and emails and such or at least remove it from list of groups in outlook.
