How to Find Inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups: Easy Ways
Microsoft Teams is a popular platform for communication and collaboration. It is a part of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Teams offer a variety of features like instant chat and messaging, video conferencing, and task management. It enables the organization’s teams to collaborate seamlessly, and stay productive and connected regardless of geographical location. Also, integration features like storage with OneDrive and third-party apps. Using these one can easily manage tasks and promote better communication and collaboration.
Teams and groups can be easily created for specific tasks, sometimes increasing in large numbers can cause problems to find the active ones. These Inactive Teams and Groups can create several issues within an organization making it difficult for employees to find our required information which leads to security risks due to outdated permissions. It can also lead to unnecessary increases in costs because of storage and licensing. So, identifying and managing inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups is important for keeping a secure, organized, and productive workspace.
Table of Content
Reasons to Find Inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups
Better User Experience- By removing or deactivating inactive Teams and Groups will help enhance user experience. Users can easily focus on active teams for better collaboration.
Cost-Saving- Inactive Teams and Groups might increase your license fees. Identifying and removing them can optimize your license cost.
Improved Security- Improves security by removing inactive teams and groups as they can cause potential security issues.
Steps to Find Inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups
There are two methods to find inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups manually. Below are the steps for both methods.
1. Using Microsoft Teams Admin Center
- Open the Microsoft Teams admin center and navigate to “Analytics and Reports”.
- Click on “Analytics and Reports” and select “Usage Reports”.
- Navigate to the “View Reports” tab and choose “Teams Usage” from the menu
- Set your desired date range between 7 and 28 days.
- Click on “Run Report”.
Now, you can see a summary report for your Teams within the selected time. The report includes:
- Number of Messages
- Number of Active Channels
- Number of Active Users in Teams and Groups
- Total active users
Once you have identified the inactive users, you can either delete or archive them. Consider these points before deleting or archiving inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups.
- Archiving will make your Teams and Groups inaccessible to users while you can use it to preserve Teams data for future purposes.
- You can delete your Teams and Groups data that is no longer in use. You cannot recover your data after deleting it, so delete unnecessary files only.
2. Using PowerShell Scripting
PowerShell is a powerful scripting tool for Microsoft environments. You can use this to find inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups. PowerShell is complex to use and requires expertise in scripting and interpreting the report. Below are the steps to use PowerShell Scripting to find inactive Teams and Groups.
- Use Microsoft 365 to establish a connection between Microsoft 365 and PowerShell using the following command.
Connect-MsOnline
- Get a list of all Microsoft Teams using the below command.
Get-Team
- Now, you can use different commands to analyze activities.
- For Mailbox Activity Use- The Search-MailboxAuditLog command.
- SharePoint Activity– Use the Get-SPOActivityFileDetail command.
- There is no PowerShell command to analyze the chat activity.
- Identify the Inactive Teams and remove them using the Remove-Team command.
Points to Consider When Using PowerShell Scripting
- Define your inactivity time in the script like( No SharePoint activity in the past 60 days, No mailbox activity in the past 180 days).
- Write a script that filters out Teams based on criteria like ownership or creation date.
- To review the files easily, export them to CSV format using the Export-CSV command.
Microsoft Admin Center approach is easy to implement, while PowerShell Scripting is complex and requires expertise. In method one, we have seen the time limit is 7 and 28 days to see activity. Sometimes, there is a requirement to see activities for a longer time, a project is on hold for two to three months, and it is not flexible for such scenarios.
Conclusion
The article covers the methods to find inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups and the requirement to find inactive Microsoft Teams and Groups with points that must be considered when using a PowerShell Scripting approach. Finding inactive Teams and Groups and archiving or deleting them can help find active members easily, enhancing communication and collaboration.
FAQs
1. How do I check Team activity?
You can see the user activity in the Teams report by selecting the User Activity tab and you can also add or remove columns from the report. The activity Report can be exported in a CSV file format by choosing the Export link.
2. Do Teams record screen activity?
The Teams screen activity can be recorded for future preferences that include meetings or calls. It includes audio, video, and screen-sharing activity. You can also share it with other colleagues within your organization. It will automatically deleted after a fixed time.
3. Can I see my Team’s history?
You can review your meeting or calls by clicking on the “History” from the calls menu. To see a detailed activity log, you can go to the “Activity” tab situated at the top of the window.
4. Can I restore a deleted Team or Group?
The deleted Team or group can be restored within 30 days of deletion using PowerShell commands or Azure Admin Center. Use the below PowerShell command to restore the deleted Team or Group:
Restore-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject
5. Is there any way to identify inactive channels within active Teams?
As of now, Microsoft does not provide any method to check channel activity separately from the Team. However, you can see activity for individual channels by using Graph API or PowerShell commands to review messages and other interactions within the channels.