Inactive SharePoint, Teams and groups
To keep our Microsoft 365 tenant secure, relevant and clutter-free, site owners will receive emails alerting them that their site has been inactive for 426 days. A team or group is considered inactive if there is no activity in all four scanned workspaces (i.e., Outlook conversations, Outlook Calendar, SharePoint, and Teams). To detect inactive teams or groups, ShareGate looks for user or system-generated activity and extracts the dates of these activities*.
SharePoint
In the SharePoint admin center, the Last activity column for Active sites.
In a group's SharePoint site, changes to the Site contents Modified column.
Activity in the associated SharePoint site of a teams' private channel.
Teams
Message and reply dates (creation and edits).
Message and reply reaction dates.
Outlook conversations
Delivery dates of email conversations.
Outlook Calendar
Creation and Last Modified dates for both recurring and non-recurring events.
*All four workspaces maybe not be present for all groups/sites.
Choosing to Keep or Delete the inactive site
Owners can choose either “Keep” or “Delete” the inactive site.
Keep the team or group if they think its content is still relevant and will be consulted in the near future.**
Delete the team or group if they think there is no more need for the team or group, its files, and its folders.***
**Once the owner says keep, inactivity has been reset and they will not be notified again for 426 day if no activity is present.
***An IT admin, you can restore a deleted team or group up to 30 days after a site has been deleted. After 30 days, restoring is not possible.
All owners of a team or group will be notified; however, an owner will only receive 1 inactivity notification per day, even if they are the owner of several inactive teams or groups.
Notifications
Notifications are sent as soon as necessary. An owner has 14 days total to respond to the notification. If an owner does not respond to the first notification, a reminder is sent after 7 days. For security, there is an expiration of 7 days for inactivity notifications.
If an owner does not answer, the team or group remains inactive until they manually take action, until the next inactivity detection cycle, or until IST send an Ask owner(s) notification.
Teams and groups will not be deleted unless that action is explicitly taken.
Sample email from IST Windows Services
The email will come from IST Windows Services (ntmaint@uwaterloo.ca) with a subject “Reminder: Take action on teams!” and look similar to the below sample:
