Forum Discussion

Sudeep Vemulapalli's avatar
Sudeep Vemulapalli
Copper Contributor
Oct 04, 2016

O365 Groups and its related content (Plan, Files, etc.) when Group Owner leaves the organization?

Can someone please let me know if the content gets deleted when a user who is a group owner leaves the company or his O365 license gets unaissigned? Will the data be deleted? Or will it stay forever?...
Office 365 Groups
Drew Madelung's avatar
Drew Madelung
MVP

There is no way to recover SharePoint data once the group has been deleted.  If you want to recover files for groups without owners you will need to add a user as an owner of the group to access/move/copy the files.  

 

Here is a script from the Office 365 for IT Pro book to find out which groups do not have owners:

# Find out which groups do not have owners
$groups = Get-UnifiedGroup
ForEach ($G in $Groups) {     
    If ($G.ManagedBy -Ne $Null)      
    {          
        $GoodGroups = $GoodGroups + 1     
    }     
    Else     
    {             
         Write-Host "Warning! The" $G.DisplayName "has no owners"          
         $BadGroups = $BadGroups + 1      
        }
    }Write-Host $GoodGroups "groups are OK but" $BadGroups "groups lack owners"

 

    • Antony Taylor's avatar
      Antony Taylor
      Steel Contributor
      Oct 05, 2016
      That repo has gone straight onto my "Useful Links" page in my notebook. Great work. the Reason I like the PowerShell Gallery is because you're able to source scripts and modules from directly in PowerShell. It's pretty cool actually.
      • TonyRedmond's avatar
        TonyRedmond
        MVP
        Oct 05, 2016

        Funny... this script looks very similar (if not identical) to the script described in Chapter 9 of "Office 365 for IT Pros", where it was originally published in late May 2016. I think I posted the code to the old Yammer-based Office 365 network too in response to a script written by Eric Zenz of Microsoft, which took a different approach to solving the problem. All of this happened around the time that Dale and I were chatting about his session to the SPTechCon in Boston in June. That session is available online at http://www.slideshare.net/dmadelung/office365-groups-from-the-ground-up-sptechcon-boston (29 June). It is a nice deck that others might be interested in seeing. I've no great objection to people sharing scripts, but I do think that the original work should be acknowledged.

         

        Example from Office 365 for IT Pros

         

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