Site Lifecycle Management Policies in SharePoint Advanced Management
SharePoint is a powerful platform for collaboration and content management; it is not surprising that millions of people use SharePoint daily to perform their tasks. A good governance plan is necessary to manage this growth, and while most organizations have some basic policies and procedures for creating, maintaining, and decommissioning sites; it has always been a challenge to find inactive sites and can be identified for deletion. This is especially important as organizations are starting to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot, and cleaning up outdated data is more important than ever.
Site lifecycle management in SharePoint Advanced Management can help organizations to easily track and inform site owners when their site is not active, and allow them to take the appropriate steps to manage their content.
To use site lifecycle management, you must first create an inactive site policy. This will allow you to create rules that define when a site is considered inactive, what sites are included in the policy, and manually exclude sites as needed.
The policy can be adjusted to target sites based on how they were created and the type of site, such as group connected sites or communication sites, etc. This will enable administrators to apply different rules based on how the site is used. For example, you can have a stricter policy for classic sites, by setting the site policy to consider a site inactive sooner than others.
Administrators can also use these policies to only target only sites created by users, and exclude anything created in the SharePoint admin center or via PowerShell.
Once the policy is configured, site owners will receive an email notification asking them to certify that the site is active or providing them information on how to delete the site.
Administrators can access a report of inactive sites in the portal, which is in CSV format. This format can help with further actions such as deleting the sites or sending additional messages to the site owners.
SharePoint Advanced Management provides a powerful tool for managing site lifecycles through its site lifecycle policies. These policies allow administrators to easily track inactive sites, inform site owners, and take appropriate actions to manage their content. By utilizing these policies, organizations can ensure that their SharePoint environment remains clean and up-to-date, improving overall efficiency and productivity.
Review the full details of site lifecycle policies and everything that’s available with SharePoint Advanced Management in the links below:
Manage site lifecycle policies - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn
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