Forum Discussion
Office 365 Groups and Site Policy / Group Life Cycle
The group expiration policy can be used to set an expiry date on selected groups. In this case, you'd set the expiration period (say, a year), and simply not renew the group when Office 365 notifies you that the group is expiring. When the expiry period lapses, Office 365 will remove the group.
See https://www.petri.com/group-expiration-policy-preview for more.
Thanks for this. I don't think this would meet the requirement for example, I have Project A and Project B sites. Project A needs to be closed on 15 December 2018 and Project B on 20 June 2018. If I create a policy with a custom date for 15 December 2018, Project B wont receive a renewal email until 20 November whereas this group should have been closed by 20 June. Hope this make sense!
This was possible through Site Policy, but apparently group expiration can only allow you to set one custom date and only one policy per tenant. Graph API seems to suggest that you can create multiple policies https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/api-reference/beta/api/grouplifecyclepolicy_addgroup
But I get an error: "message": "Error in validating lifecycle manangement policy. Error: Tenant already has maximum allowed 1 policy(s).",
If you simply want to close down a group at a particular time, you can do this with PowerShell. Once you are happy that the Project is done, you run a script to:
1. Remove all users from the group membership except an administrator, who remains the group owner.
2. Hide the group from address lists.
3. Make sure that the group is private.
The group is now in a hidden, one-member only state. The content remains discoverable and available if need be. You could combine this process by assigning classification labels to the content that are event-driven so that Office 365 will remove the content after another period passes. For example, the project closes in January 2018 and you retain the information for another year. In January 2019., the content is removed from Office 365...
TR
Not 100% about this, but it's possible that Azure Information Protection (AIP) licensing is needed for the policy you're trying to create, and by default it allows the single policy per tenant. This guess is based on the understanding that it will be possible to apply AIP Labels (where a label is basically the Display Name of a policy) to content anywhere in M365 - Exchange, OneDrive, SPO, etc. There is already a fair bit of documentation available on the topic, including a roadmap for availability of labels in SPO, which I presume will by extension apply to groups.
Cheers,
-Eli.
Vijay NelsonMicrosoft
There can be only one group expiration policy set in a tenant. The policy expires O365 groups and its apps, based on the group creation/renew date. So we cannot set custom expiration periods for each group.
Thanks Vijay Nelson. Does it mean that we don't have a way to implement site policies on the team sites? Are there any workarounds? I am sure this must be a very common scenario for many customers.
There is always the choice to leave the native possibilities of O365 and use 3rd Party solutions. For your case this could be Governance Automation Online.
I think be able to set different settings like for Teams only is a user voice topic. Also not happy about classic sites not included in this governance view. So again , not the first time, effort on top.
