Groups Lifecycle / Archiving / Moving

[Ivan Unger]

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!

[#2]

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 @Ivan Unger already mentioned

Additional point:

- how to transform exisiting SharePoints to groups?

[#3]

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.

[#4]

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.

[#5]

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

[#6]

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.

[#7]

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

[#8]

The scenario you advance is dependent on being able to recover items from the individual workload repositories and stitch them together to recover a group. That might indeed be possible, but I suspect not - at least not in a clean and seamless manner. For example, Exchange Online supports inactive mailboxes (deleted but still under hold), but group mailboxes don't normally show up when the recover/restore cmdlets are used, so I think you would have to perform a content search, export to PST, and import to a new group mailbox. But of course, you can't move data from a PST into a group mailbox to recreate conversations... See what I mean?  And then what about associated plans, BI workspaces, and so on?

[#9]

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. 

[#10]

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?

[#11]

Certainly you can close down a group by removing all users from the membership list and hiding it from the GAL. In effect, you put the group into an "inactive" status. Later on, you can remove the group if you don't want to keep it around, perhaps by running a PowerShell script to look for inactive groups and deleting those who are found. Microsoft is due to introduce a policy-based method to do this by assigning groups a lifecycle period. When a group's lifecycle period expires, the owner receives a message to renew the "lease" on the group and extend its lifetime. If they want, the owner can decide to have the group removed at that point.

If you put a group into inactive status and discover later on that you need to resurrect the group, you unhide the group to reveal it in the GAL and add whoever needs to access the group to the membership list.

[#12]

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.

[#13]

Juan Carlos González recently published advice similar to Tony's but with additional elements:

• Remove all owners from the group’s membership list.
• Remove all users from the group’s membership list.
• Add a new group owner. Ideally, this should be a special compliance administration account instead of a tenant administrator.
• Ensure that the group is private so that its documents stay invisible to Delve or other searches.
• Block email by changing the group primary SMTP address and set RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled property to $True to stop Exchange Online accepting any external email sent to the group.
• Hide the group so that it does not appear in the GAL and other address lists

This can be found at Is it possible to archive any Office 365 Group not required / in use anymore?

[#14]

This is precisely the list that I publish in Chapter 15 of "Office 365 for IT Pros", which is what JCM notes in his blog...

[#15]

Thanks for the pointer to your book; sorry I missed JCM's reference to it!

[#16]

No worries. Quite a lot of people have never heard of the book or believe that they might need such a book (after all, everything's on the web - right?), but we like pushing the boundaries of knowledge about Office 365 forward in the form of a living book and that's all that really matters...

[#17]

We are a holding company and the questions never end about what to use when and where.

From a person who references the book frequently it is a great resource!

A coworker was at a User group meeting today about O365 adoption and gave them the link to the book.

Which reminds me to get the August update...

[#18]

Very cool. Thanks so much for supporting the project. We have fun publishing the book too... Stay tuned for the August 18 update on Friday!

[#19]

Hi

I guess this is the group to post my questions for clarification:

Scenario: We like to use groups only in Outlook for now. One folder per project. Our company has about 200 projects a year. After a project is finished - the mails in the group need to remain accessible in an easy way (so far we are working with public folders, adding runnig projects to favourites).

General Question: So far we group projects by year. Is it possible keep finished project (groups) in a similar structure, or any structure as far as it is easy to access and search yet not cluttering the group folder in Outlook (where only the unfinished projects shoud go)?

Specific Questions: how to realize the general question:

• Can an "archive" folder be added where finished projects can be moved to?
• If yes, how to move groups?
• Subfolders would be desireable too --> 200 projects/year --> 1000project/5years --> lot to scroll (according to this site this is not possible... any thoughts how to keep some sort of order)?

If you have some Ideas it would be great.

[#20]

The issue you run into is that Outlook Groups only expose the Inbox folder in current clients.

What you could do is create a separate Outlook Group for each project. Users can mark groups as favorites so that they have easy access to the projects they work on. Having a separate group gives you:

• An email address for the project (like a public folder)
• SharePoint site to store the project documents
• Planner to store project tasks
• Shared mailbox for project email
• Shared calendar for project meetings

Outlook mobile clients can access the groups, so that's another advantage.

When a project is over, you can archive it easy by removing the project members. The groups stay online and are accessible for eDiscovery and compliance purposes or in case a project needs to spin up again.