SharePoint Lifecycle Management
Most IT admins already check the SharePoint admin center for sites that have gone quiet. SharePoint Lifecycle Management does that check on a schedule, then asks each site's own admin — not you — whether it should stay active or move into the Vault.
How it works
A scan runs on a schedule you choose — daily, weekly, or whatever cadence fits the client, on a real day, hour, and timezone, not a shared default. Each run checks every SharePoint site’s real, Microsoft-reported last-activity date against a threshold you configure. Not a guess: the same signal Microsoft’s own admin center shows.
- A site crosses the configured idle threshold, with no edits or visits in that window.
- BYOVault resolves the site’s real admin — the actual owner, or your configured fallback contact if one can’t be found.
- That person gets one email with a simple choice: keep the site active, or archive it into the Retention Vault.
If they choose to archive, the site’s data moves through the same vault-move pipeline as regular Archiving — the identical storage-layer immutability, the identical guarantees. If they choose to keep it, nothing happens. If they never respond, nothing happens either: the site is simply re-evaluated on the next scan, never defaulted into an outcome nobody chose.
What this will never do
This feature will never delete a SharePoint site. Archiving moves a site’s data into the Vault — the site itself stays exactly where it is in Microsoft 365, under your control. Deletion stays what it has always been: a deliberate, manual action taken directly in the Microsoft 365 admin center, by someone who meant to do it.
Why we built it this way
The easy version of this feature would have picked a default — auto-archive anything idle past 90 days, say — and called it done. We looked hard at that option and walked away from it, for one specific reason: “idle” and “unimportant” are not the same thing. A legal hold site, a compliance archive, a dormant project that’s about to restart under a new name — all of them look identical to a scan that only measures activity. The only person who can actually tell the difference is someone who knows the site’s real context, and that’s never been us.
There’s a second reason, more specific to SharePoint itself: a site connected to a Microsoft 365 Group isn’t an island. Delete the wrong one and you don’t just lose a document library — you can take the whole Team, its channels, and every conversation in it down with it. That’s not a risk we’re willing to let an algorithm take on your behalf, no matter how confident its activity threshold looks on a dashboard.
So the system draws a hard line: it finds, it flags, it asks — and it stops there. Archiving only ever happens because a real person, the one closest to that specific site, looked at it and said yes. Nobody responds, nothing happens — the review simply comes back around next cycle, re-asked, never defaulted. BYOVault’s whole job in this flow is to put the right question in front of the right person. Deciding stays theirs.
Setting it up
Turn this on per tenant from the SharePoint Lifecycle Management page in the operator dashboard. It is off by default for every tenant until explicitly enabled.
- Idle threshold & grace period — how long since last activity counts as idle, and how long a brand-new site is exempt.
- Scan frequency, day, hour & timezone — a real schedule per tenant, not a shared default.
- Excluded site types — template types (search centers, eDiscovery, communication sites, and similar) that are never scanned or flagged.
- Decision options — Keep or Archive by default; optionally adds a third “recommend delete” choice that only notifies your team, since BYOVault itself never deletes anything.
- Weekly governance report — an optional emailed summary of every site reviewed, its outcome, and when.