Office 365 Groups Expiration - Need Exclusion Feature
What’s really needed is an exclusion list, ex: Expire all groups EXCEPT for these 5 that I really really care about. All the others, let the owners decide if they want to keep them, but these 5, I keep important stuff in there, and I don’t want to sweat it about missing an email and potentially losing all that information.
Otherwise, due to the dynamic nature of groups, if I set a selected list of groups that I want to expire, I would have to keep coming back to this to keep it updated since any user can self create a group.


Thanks for the feedback! Now that we’ve enabled Group Expiry and Expiry Autorenewal, we are evaluating the work required to implement an exclusion list. Please keep the feedback and votes coming. Thanks!
23 comments
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Anonymous commented
This is a no brainer because every organization has the one or two teams with content that they need for whatever reason, however, this option could still allow all other content to go away as per policy
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tball sa commented
The feature as implemented is *backwards* - as many others have stated, excluding groups from expiry rather than including them as far more useful.
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Trey Bentley commented
I have created a PowerShell solution for this, that resets the Expiration Date for groups in a specified array within the script. Where should I post the script, to help people until MS is able to implement an official solution?
Until informed otherwise, it's here: https://pastebin.com/NpUcQKbD -
Anonymous commented
The expiration policy will treat a group is active based on three activities only: SharePoint, Outlook, Teams. How about those activities in Power BI, Planner, Project and Stream? A Office 365 Group can be used without Teams enabled and used for those 4 services only. The group owner will receive the expiration notification email (the email is not mentioning these services at all) and may just delete the group (even it is actively in used in that 4 services).
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Max Goss commented
This is a really high priority feature and agree with the comments that it should really have been considered from day 1. We need a way to exclude groups, or a group of groups from the policy.
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Matt Brinkhoff commented
We cannot use the group expiration feature without the ability to exempt certain groups from it.
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Daniel Hudson commented
This is the EXACT feature we need! We want all our Groups to have expiration by default, but for certain groups we want to exclude them from the policy where we have to keep their data for auditing purposes. Really surprised this isn't even up for consideration at the moment.
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Troy commented
I really don't understand why this wasn't a day 1 feature. this is an absolute must!
I am really struggling with users bagging out Teams and wanting slack. The more I use teams, the more I understand why. -
Anonymous commented
Can we get a commitment from Microsoft to implement this sorely-needed feature?
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Anonymous commented
This is a big miss. We really need to be able to exempt some groups from the policy.
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Rama commented
This is REALLY needed. When 'ManagedGroupTypes' is set to 'All' there is no way to exclude certain groups. We could set this to 'Selected' but then we have to add all self-serve groups to this list. Since users can self-serve them from various services like SharePoint, Teams, Planner and so on, it is hard if not impossible to implement it.
Just like how naming convention can be overridden by global admins and few other people, it would be great if overriding expiration/life cycle policy is extended to groups created by those people as well.
Even better if while ManagedGroupTypes is All, we can exclude any given group at any point of time from expiration policy. Thank you.
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Anonymous commented
This is exactly what we are looking for: Exceptions to the global expiration policy.
Scenario: IT sets up a finite number of Teams (e.g. for each department), but allows end users to create ad-hoc teams. All ad-hoc will expire according to the global expiration policy, but the departmental teams will not. -
Chris commented
Why is this still not a feature after 2 years! The current function is hardly usefull and can be added to the hit and miss list of Microsoft.
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Avi Ben-Simon commented
It makes no sense not to have only expiring groups, especially if when expired the group will lose historic records. there mast be an option to exclude specific groups from expirations.
Anyway, when a group about to expire, ahead of time and with many warnings, the owners, and eventually, when there is no answer from the owners, even participants should be made aware of the impending action so people are aware of it and have the opportunity to take actions prior to expiry date. -
David Binisti commented
This is very important to have the possibility to exclude some groups where we don't want to have an expiration policy on them.
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Mark Simone commented
This is currently a big miss. It should really be based on a combination of the last activity of the underlying features (last chat activity, last sharepoint activity, last mailbox activity). Ideally, these should be options as well because something like a mailbox that may be receiving automated incoming email from the company should be optional as the last activity check.
Additionally, it would be nice to see the ability to have more than just a tenant policy for expiration. Admins should be able to create multiple policies that possibly leverage the classification labels for example. -
Star D. commented
The flag and labels ideas are excellent additions.
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Mark Simone commented
It would be great if we could leverage the classifcation labels into this feature as well, whereby we could add an expiration policy based on the labels. This way we could assign different polices to the different types of TEAMS.
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Benoit Fournier commented
I also think a flag per group is a better option than a white list.
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Tim Crean commented
I think rather than a whitelist, it would be better to have an “exclude from expiration policy” flag which can be set at group creation. Maybe have it default to false, but if set to True then that group would never be part of expiration policy.