Overview
Effective February 23rd, 2026, UIC is implementing an expiration policy for Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams.
Groups or Teams that have been inactive for 365 days will go through a 30-day expiration process, during which the owners of those groups or Teams will be notified via email that they are expiring and need to be renewed. If they are not renewed after 30 days, they will be deleted. Group/Team owners can still recover deleted groups for 30 days before they are permanently deleted.
Groups or Teams that are active will be automatically renewed around 35 days before the group expires. In this case, the owner doesn't get any renewal notifications. Any of the following actions will automatically renew a group:
- SharePoint - View, edit, download, move, share, or upload files. (Viewing a SharePoint page doesn't count as an action for automatic renewal.)
- Outlook - Join or edit group, read or write group message from the group, and like a message (Outlook on the web).
- Teams - Visit a teams channel.
- Viva Engage - View a post within a Viva Engage community or an interactive email in Outlook.
- Forms - View, create, or edit forms, or submit a response to a form.
How does the expiration process work?
Owners of inactive Microsoft 365 groups or Teams will receive notifications through email. These will be sent 30 days, 15 days, and 1 day before expiration.
Team owners will also receive notifications in Teams.
This shows an example of the email notification:
If no action is taken and the group is allowed to expire, it will be deleted. Another email is sent informing the group's owners of that:
Group owners then have 30 days to restore the group, if desired, by clicking the "Restore group" button in that email.