This is a quick review of the new groups expiration feature in Office 365.
Pros: Very simple to configure – set a group expiration of 180, 365, or Custom.
Then enter an email address of someone to notify if a group does not have an owner.
Those two settings make perfect sense.
The third setting is why I am writing this blog post. The setting ‘Enable expiration for these Office 365 groups” [All] [Selected] or [None]
Let’s dissect this a bit…
ALL probably makes sense …
None might make sense…
But I’m having a hard time understanding when I would select certain groups for expiration. You see, by the very nature these Groups are very dynamic usually – by default, any user can create a group. So if today I pick a set of 15 groups that I want to expire, then tomorrow there could be 30 more created that will not expire. So then, I would have to continuously come back here and update that list if there were some groups that I did not want to have deleted. So my choice would then have to be revert to the None setting.
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.
So Microsoft, I hope you are listening, please add an Exclusion button. I posted this idea to the UserVoice site here if you want to vote on it!
The Cloud Technologist 