Lifecycle Policies help you get rid of unnecessary bloat left over by old, unused Teams and Spaces.
They allow you to institute Automatic Archiving and Deletion Procedures that will free up the time that would otherwise be spent on manual Team management.
You can set up how many days a certain Lifecycle lasts, when you'll get notified about it, and when the Space actually gets deleted.
Let's set up a Lifecycle together to get a better idea of how this feature works in the real world.
🔀 Lifecycle Flow
A Lifecycle policy will automatically archive Teams after the number of days you've specified passes (up to 712 days).
The number of days can be calculated based on a Fixed Date or Activity:
Fixed Date - Counts the number of days from the Team Creation date or a Calendar Metadata field.
Activity - Starts counting off the days as soon as the Team ceases to be active (no posts, no reactions, no calls, etc.).
💡In order to base your lifecycles on activity, you need to disable the
Since this action might be against your company policy, please consult the
appropriate data protection authority within your organization before
disabling it.
Once the Team reaches the end of its Lifecycle, the admin receives a notification with the option of extending the deadline, given that the corresponding setting is enabled during setup.
Even if the admin fails to notice the notification, they'll be able to Reactivate archived Spaces.
You can take things even further with Automatic Deletion; however, in most use cases, simply archiving the Space is enough and leaves you with the option of recovering it when needed.
⚙️ Set Up
Navigate to Settings > Lifecycle management in Teams Manager and click on + Add lifecycle to get started.
Specify the Name and Description for your Lifecycle.
Consider enabling the Extension possible toggle to have a chance to extend the Lifecycle when a Team is about to be archived, and click Next to get to the Archiving section.
Choose the desired calculation type and set the archival timeline. Consider enabling the Set SharePoint site as read only toggle if you want to disable the ability to edit SharePoint content once the corresponding Team has been archived.
The Deletion section allows you to take decluttering to the next level and actually delete the Teams after they've been archived.
Deletion always occurs a set number of days after archival, and you can base it either on the Archival Date or a Number field:
• Archival Date - Allows you to set the number of days until deletion with
a traditional slider.
• Number Field - Allows you to utilize the value of a number field as the
number of days left until deletion.
❗Keep in mind that not responding to the confirmation notification for
Teams that are about to be deleted will mean that they'll be permanently
erased from your account and won't be recoverable.
Please make sure that you're fully aware of the data-loss risks prior to
enabling automated Deletion.
6. Once you're done setting up your Lifecycle, simply click Create to finalize it.
7. Just creating a Lifecycle won't apply it to any Templates. In order to make
the Lifecycle active, you'll need to create a Policy Execution.
📱 Content Type Interactions
Lifecycles operate differently across different M365 Content Types.
(MS Teams-) Teams - Full Functionality - Can receive Lifecycle Expiry notifications and be Archived/Deleted automatically. It's also the only content type that supports Activity-based Lifecycles.
SharePoint Site - Can receive Lifecycle Expiry notifications, but cannot be Archived. There's an option that mimics archival by setting the page to read-only mode. It's also possible to perform an automatic deletion of the page upon the full expiry of the Lifecycle.
Communication site - Doesn't support Lifecycle functionality.
Modern site without group - Doesn't support Lifecycle functionality.
Viva Engage - Can receive Lifecycle Expiry notifications, but cannot be Archived. It's also possible to perform an automatic deletion of the page upon the full expiry of the Lifecycle.
Planner - Can receive Lifecycle Expiry notifications, but cannot be Archived. It's also possible to perform an automatic deletion of the page upon the full expiry of the Lifecycle.
👣 Next Steps
Now that you’ve created your Lifecycle, you can activate it via Policies or start setting up Approval Processes.
We recommend starting here:
⛑️ Need more help?
Get further assistance with Teams Manager through our support chat widget within the app, or reach out to us at support@solutions2share.com