With the increase in usage of Office 365 Teams and Office 365 Groups, administrators and users need a way to clean up unused groups. IT has implemented a change to enable Group expiration that will help remove inactive groups from the system and make things cleaner.


An inactive Team or Group will expire after a period of 1 year unless an automatic renewal action is performed. 

Teams and Groups which are actively being used will be automatically renewed. Any of the following actions will automatically renew a Team or Group:
  • SharePoint (Team Sites) - view, edit, download, move, share, or upload files
  • Outlook (Group) - join group, read or write group message from the group, and like a message in Outlook on the web
  • Teams - visiting a Teams channel
For Teams, the Team owners will receive notifications to renew through the activity section of the Teams app.

For Groups that were created using Outlook, Planner, SharePoint, or any other app (excluding Teams), owners will receive automated expiration notifications via email starting at 30 days, 15 days, and 1 day prior to the expiration of the Group.


From the Renew group notification email, group owners can directly access the group details page in the Access Panel. There, the users can get more information about the group such as its description, when it was last renewed, when it will expire, and the ability to renew the group.


If an owner does not renew the Team or Group before it expires, Office 365 can restore it for up to 30 days after its expiration. Additionally, owners will receive an automated email notification after they allow a group to expire.