Many organizations produce a large number of Teams (and thus Office 365 Groups) in Microsoft Teams . In the long run, you risk that the amount of groups becomes so large that you lose the overview and thus you stand there with a number of Microsoft Teams that are not used and whose content may not need to be saved.

If your organization has Azure AD Premium then you can use the “Office 365 Group Expiration Policy” to clean up Teams / Groups that have not been used for a long time.
The expiration date is calculated from when you create the team / group. The owner is always notified in time before the team / group is deleted and thus given the opportunity to extend the life span.

In addition to “Office 365 Group Expiration Policy”, we can now see in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap that the feature “Microsoft Teams – teams auto-renewal” is “In development”. When launched it brings the functionality that when a member visits a channel in the team, the expiration date is automatically renewed, thus reducing the need for the team owner to renew the expiration time.

Here You can read more about Office 365 Group Expiration Policy and Teams auto-renewal

Here You can also read how it works together with Retention Policies.

And by the way, don’t forget to update your governance plans if you implement this functionality 😉

Image credits to  Gerd Altmann on Pixabay