Expiring M365 Groups and You

Introduction

As per the Audit, and CHN-190, we are now allowing Microsoft to automatically find and report on inactive M365 groups in the environment. This doc shows the process/procedure for how this is going to work. This will be implemented for all tenants eventually.

The How

Microsoft goes in depth for how this works in this artcile: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/solutions/microsoft-365-groups-expiration-policy

M365/Teams groups are monitored by Microsoft.
If no SharePoint/Teams Chat/etc. have been utilized for a given group for X days, Microsoft begins the cleanup process.
The process starts at 30 days before group deletion, when the group owner is notified of the incoming deletion.
1. If there is no group owner, the alert is sent to (as of 06/15/23) the Azure Engineering Team General channel.
  - Future plans are to have the alert be made into a Fresh Ticket for proper tracking.
The group owner is alerted two more times, 15 days and 1 day before group deletion.
If no action is taken, and if the group/sharepoint/team/etc. have not been used in this time, the group is automatically deleted by Microsoft.
The group remains in a soft deleted state for 30 days and can be recovered if necessary.

Example Renewal Email:

Action Items

In the event you are presented with an alert for a group deletion (meaning there is no group owner).

Verify who is in the group currently.
Verify if they share a common manager or central person to talk to.
Reach out to the manager and/or members of the group to verify if they still need it.
- If they still need it, tell them how this all works and that they'll have to regularly use it to avoid deletion.
- If they approve it can be removed - go do the thing.
Record your actions somewhere, either in DevOps or a ticket you create for yourself, or something, so we have notes on actions taken.
In the future, we're planning to have this create Fresh tickets, so we can keep all actions in there.