Here’s a new announcement, long overdue: Microsoft has put user activity-based expiration policies in Private Preview for Groups.
That’s a mouthful, so here’s what that means.
Groups in Office 365 are a fundamental membership service that gets used by other services in Office 365 – Yammer, Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint. Microsoft’s vision for workplace collaboration is built on Groups, and so it’s easy for users to create new Groups, and required for modern workplace services.
This is a nightmare for an IT manager. Imagine being responsible for an environment with 10,000 employees, and every one of them can create a group. It won’t take long before there are hundreds of Groups in the environment, and they’ll persist even if they’re no longer needed. The problem to solve is: removing unneeded Groups without accidentally removing content that must be kept.
Now, basically Microsoft is allowing administrators to create a policy that automatically closes out Groups that have not been accessed or modified by anyone.
So, huzzah! If you’re signed up for Private Preview, try it out.