Today we’re announcing the public preview of Office 365 groups expiration for Azure Active Directory Premium customers. You can now manage the lifecycle of Office 365 groups, by setting an expiration duration for any group you choose. Once this is set, owners will be asked to renew their group as they come close to expiry if they want to continue to use them. Any group that is not renewed will be deleted.

Office 365 group expiry in the Azure Active Directory dashboard

Office 365 groups expiration can be configured from the Azure Active Directory portal, as well as programmatically via Azure Active Directory PowerShell. You can also create a policy that applies to all the groups in your tenant.

30 days prior to the expiration of a group, renewal notifications are sent out by email to the owners of the group, from which they can renew their group with a single click. If the owners don’t renew the group within the required timeframe, the group expires, and is deleted.

This is all made possible with two features we recently shipped: soft-delete and restore. This means you can restore your Office 365 group and all its content, including SharePoint, Planner, Outlook and so on, for a period of 30 days from when the group was deleted. Check out more details about how to restore deleted Office 365 groups here. 

The Office 365 groups expiration feature is available in public preview today for Azure AD Premium customers. We’ll be contacting all Office 365 customers who subscribe to Azure AD Premium via the message center to let them know this is available. Check out Alex’s blog post on the Enterprise Mobility and Security Blog.