Team expiration and renewal in Microsoft Teams

Organizations with a large number of teams often have teams that are never actually used. This can happen because of several reasons including product experimentation, short-term team collaboration, or team owners leaving the organization. Over time, such teams can accumulate and create a burden on tenant resources.

Team & Group expiration is automatically set to 180 days. Because teams are backed by groups, group expiration policies automatically apply to teams as well.

Teams & Groups that are actively in use are renewed automatically. Any of the following actions will auto-renew a group:

• Teams - visiting a teams channel.
• SharePoint - view, edit, download, move, share, or upload files.
• Outlook - join group, read or write group message from the group, and like a message (Outlook on the web).

Team owners receive notifications for team renewal 30 days, 15 days and 1 day before the team's expiration date. When the team owner receives the notification, they can click Renew now in team settings to renew the team.

If a Team is deleted, all it's data is gone. Chats, Files, Folders. There is a 30 day soft delete period where we can restore files pretty easily. After that it gets more complicated. Teams that aren't used anymore, but you are hesitant to delete can also be archived. Please submit a ticket if you want your Team archived instead.

Expiration Notice via Email

Here and example of an expiration notice for a Microsoft Team. It talks about the group in this example, but the group is the foundation of the team so it all works together.

You can also delete a team/group right when the notifications comes in by clicking the delete it now link.

Renew a team