Archiving and Deleting Teams in Microsoft Teams: Easier Than You Think

Microsoft Teams is increasingly becoming an indispensable tool in work and study. With its convenience, Teams helps us to easily organize work and communicate more effectively. However, when there are too many teams that have completed their work, you will wonder: "Should I archive or delete the team for better management?". Don't worry! This article will help you understand when to do what and how to do it in detail.

1. Host a team in Microsoft Teams

Follow these steps to archive a group.

Click Teams on the left menu bar Microsoft Teams

At the top of the list of teams, select More Options > Manage Teams

In the list of active groups, find the teacher group you want to archive, then select More Options > Archive Team

To prevent people from editing content in SharePoint sites and Wiki tabs associated with the team, select Make the SharePoint site read-only for team members. (The team owner can still edit this content.) –> Click Archive

2. Delete a team in Microsoft Teams

If a group is only allowed to operate during a project or topic or class, when it ends you can completely delete it to avoid confusion during use and management.

Click Teams on the left menu bar Microsoft Teams

Click on the team you want to delete > More Option > Delete the Teams

A confirmation dialog box appears > Select I understand that everything well be deleted > Delete team to permanently delete the team

3. Restore a deleted team in Microsoft Teams

There are cases in reality, when working with too many groups, users or group co-owners accidentally delete some groups, so all data, channels, and exchanges inside the group disappear. This sometimes has a negative impact on your psychology, leading to a decrease in work efficiency, but don't worry too much, you can still restore it. However, restoring a deleted group is not as simple as restoring an archived group. When a group is restored, it means we will restore all channels, content, documents, and links related to the group.

To do this you need to be a group administrator or global administrator and follow the steps below in the correct order.

By default, a deleted group in Office 365 is retained for 30 days. This 30-day period is called a “soft delete” because during this time you can restore the group.

Step 1: Go to Microsoft 365 admin center

Step 2. At the main interface of Microsoft 365 admin center > select Groups > Deleted Groups

Step 3: In the list of deleted groups, find (or search for quick) the name of the group you want to restore > select the group and select Restore group

4. Permanently delete a group

Sometimes in practice there are cases where you need to permanently delete a group containing confidential or sensitive information and do not want to wait 30 days to permanently delete it. To do this we need to use PowerShell, start PowerShell and run the command below to get the group ID.

Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup

Note: Be careful when getting the ID of groups that need to be permanently deleted, because this is very dangerous, if you delete it by mistake you cannot recover it.

Once you get the ID, run the following command in PowerShell to permanently delete the group.

Remove-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject -Id

To confirm that your group was successfully deleted, run the Get-AzureADMSDelatted Group command again to confirm that the group no longer appears in the list of soft deleted groups. In some cases, it may take up to 24 hours for the group and all data in the group to be permanently deleted.

Archiving or deleting a team in Microsoft Teams not only helps you manage the system better but also increases your work efficiency. If the project is over but you still need the data, choose to archive. If you no longer need it, deleting the team is a reasonable solution. Hopefully this article has provided enough information for you to do it easily. If you have any questions or other good tips, don't hesitate to share.