March 30, 2021

Automating archival of teams in MS Teams

Introduction

In MS Teams, you can create teams for various purposes. Some teams are created for temporary endeavors or short-term projects, while some teams are created for long-term projects. Either way, once the purpose of a team is fulfilled, you may want to dispose of or delete it as you don’t need it any further.

Once you choose to delete a team, all data objects related to the team get deleted at the backend as well. Remember, you can’t retrieve the team and its associated data after a 30-day period. Hence, if you want to retain a teams’ information for historical, regulatory, or business purposes, then you must choose to save or archive it.

What is archival in MS Teams?

Archiving teams in MS Teams is an excellent capability to manage files and govern information. A team is tied to plenty of applications. Besides, it contains channels and conversations related to channels where the content of high value is constantly shared.

These teams occupy a lot of workspaces. As and when the adoption escalates,  these workspaces expand dramatically. This further leads to common IT issues such as resource exhaustion, content mismanagement, content overload, content loss, content sprawl, lack of content visibility and poor search.

Considering these pointers, you must archive the workspaces in MS Teams once a project is over. By doing this, you actually lock the team workspace where all the activities in a team are completed and make it read-only. Now, no further changes are possible in the team such as initiating a chat or conversation, creating channels, or editing the team settings. However, you can still add or remove team members.

Now, let us go through the steps to archive and unarchive a team in MS Teams.

How to archive and unarchive a team

To archive a team in MS Teams, you must be a Teams admin. Then, follow the given steps:

  1. Go to the admin center and select Teams.
  2. Select a team by clicking the team name.
  3. Select Archive. The following message will appear.
  4. To prevent people from editing the content in the SharePoint site and Wiki tab associated with the team, select Make the SharePoint site read-only for team members. (Teams owners will still be able to edit this content.)
  5. Select Archive to archive the team. The team’s status will change to Archived.

Now to unarchive or reactivate the team, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the admin center, select Teams.
  2. Select a team by clicking the team name.
  3. Select Unarchive. This will change the team’s status to Active.

How to delete and restore a team

If you are a Teams admin, you can delete a team by following the given steps:

  1. Go to the admin center, select Teams.
  2. Select a team by clicking the team name.
  3. Select Delete. This will prompt a confirmation message.
  4. Select Delete to permanently delete the team.

Next, you can restore a deleted team by restoring the Microsoft 365 group that’s associated with the team. Restoring the Microsoft 365 group for a team restores team content, including tabs, standard channels, and private channels and their associated site collections.

If you are a global administrator or a groups administrator, you can restore a deleted group in the Microsoft 365 admin center:

  1. Go to the admin center.
  2. Expand Groups, and then click Deleted groups.
  3. Select the group that you want to restore, and then click Restore group.

Do we need more?

The current archival and retrieval process is satisfactory but when teams multiply exponentially, managing all teams and channels using the same method gets difficult. In such a case, archiving teams one by one manually is both time-consuming and unpleasant.

To overcome this challenge, some organizations choose to turn off the self-service feature of teams’ creation by end-users. However, enforcing such controls doesn’t help significantly as teams gradually become wild west sometimes. On the other side, curbing the ability to provision new teams also diminishes the likability and acceptance of the tool. Hence, this demands a scalable solution with strong governance.

What if you could archive teams automatically that are inactive for 3 months?

How automation helps in teams archival

Automation allows a more practical solution to teams’ archival and governance. Using a third-party solution such as TeamsHub by Cyclotron, you can easily automate the entire lifecycle of a team in MS Teams, starting from its creation to disposal.

You can enable the maximum duration for a team to be considered active in your environment by configuring a group expiration policy after which it will auto-archive or auto-delete the team. You can also schedule automatic notifications such as reminders and alerts for an owner to take some action in response to a team’s inactivity.

Similarly, using TeamsHub by Cyclotron, you can automate lifecycle management of SharePoint sites and Yammer groups.

Conclusion

Leveraging the power of automation in MS Teams, TeamsHub by Cyclotron takes away the painstaking experience of management of teams, eases teams archiving, smartly controls Teams data, and reduces common IT risks in the virtual workspace to improve user efficiency and engagement in an unparalleled way.

To explore more about TeamsHub by Cyclotron, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo

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