Manage unused Web sites (Office SharePoint Server)

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

Unused Web sites are deleted if they remain inactive for a specified period of time. In this scenario, a notice e-mail is sent to the site owner after 90 days, asking if the sites are in use. The decision to delete or to take any other action on the sites depends on the owner's response. Unconfirmed site collections can also be deleted automatically. This feature can be enabled and configured on the SharePoint Central Administration Web site.

Site usage confirmation and deletion can help you keep your environment cleaner, by helping you to identify when sites are no longer needed. This feature works by automatically sending e-mail messages to site owners to check if their site is active. If the owner does not respond to the e-mail message, (after a specified number of messages are sent, over a specified period of time), the site can be deleted.

To use this feature, you must configure Outgoing E-mail settings.

Before configuring Outgoing E-mail settings, you should determine the following:

• How long you want to wait before checking if a site is inactive. The default time period for a team or for the project sites is 90 days after site creation, but you need to give owners a longer time period. You can give the owners a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of 365 days as the notice period.

• How often you want to send an e-mail message to site owners to see if their sites are inactive. After the first e-mail message, if the site owner does not respond, you can continue with additional notices at daily, weekly, or monthly intervals.

• Whether you want to automatically delete unused sites. If the site owner does not respond to multiple e-mail messages, do you want to go ahead and delete the site automatically? If so, we recommend that you make a backup first. You can do so by making sure that regular backups are performed. Note that this is not default behavior. You can use the Office SharePoint Server 2007: Software Development Kit, to customize this functionality, so that it automatically backs up the site before deletion.

For more information about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, see SharePoint Server 2007 SDK: Software Development Kit.

• If you are planning to automatically delete unused sites, how many e-mail messages will you send to the site owners before doing so? By default, 28 daily notices are sent before site deletion, but you can increase or decrease this number to suit your requirements. You can send a minimum of 28 and a maximum of 168 notices on a daily basis. On a weekly basis, you can send a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 24 notices, and on a monthly basis, you can send a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 6 notices to site owners.

The e-mail notification contains links to confirm that a site collection is active or inactive. After an e-mail notification is sent to the site collection owner, there are three possible outcomes:

• If the site is in use, the site collection owner confirms that the site collection is active and the site collection is preserved. When the owner clicks the confirmation link, the certification date of the site is renewed.

• If the site collection is not in use, the owner can delete the site collection by following the instructions in the e-mail notification or wait until receiving a response from the site owner and then take the required action. The owner continues to receive periodic e-mail notifications according to the interval specified by the server administrator, until the owner confirms that the site collection is in use or deletes the site collection.

• If the site collection is not in use and the server administrator has turned on the automatic deletion feature, e-mail notifications are sent to the site collection owner for the specified number of times. If the site collection owner does not confirm the status of the site collection, the site collection is deleted automatically.

We recommend the following best practices to safeguard against the automatic deletion of a site:

• Require a secondary contact when users create site collections.

By default, the site collection creator is listed as site collection owner. Depending on your configuration, the user must also specify a secondary contact for the site collection. Confirmation notifications are automatically sent to the site collection owner and the secondary contact, if any.

• Keep your organization informed of your vacations and leave plans.

For example, if a site collection owner is unavailable for four weeks, and the server administrator has set the site collections to be deleted, after four missed weekly confirmations, the site might be deleted without giving the owner a chance to confirm the usage of the site.

• Ensure that there is a schedule to back up site collections regularly, so that you can restore a recent copy if a site collection is deleted accidentally.

Membership in Farm Administrators is the minimum requirement to complete this procedure.

Manage unused Web sites

Use this procedure to manage unused Web sites.

Manage unused Web sites by using the user interface

1. On the SharePoint Central Administration Web site, click Application Management.

2. On the Application Management page, in the SharePoint Site Management section, click Site Use Confirmation and Deletion.

3. On the Site Use Confirmation and Deletion page, in the Web Application section, click the down arrow next to Web Application, and then click Change Web Application.

4. Select the Web application name for which you want to configure the confirmation and deletion settings.

5. In the Confirmation and Automatic Deletion Settings section:

   • Select or clear the Send e-mail notification to owners of unused site collections check box.

   • Specify the number of days, after the site creation or after the site usage is confirmed, to start sending notifications (minimum of 30 and maximum of 365 days).

   • Specify how frequently the e-mail confirmation notifications should be sent: daily, weekly, or monthly (by default, it is daily). You can also specify exact time to run the check for the site usage (by default, it is midnight).

   • Select the Automatically delete the site collection check box if the usage is not confirmed.

   • Specify the number of confirmation notices to be sent before deleting the site collection (by default it is 28 notices).

6. Click OK.

See Also

Concepts

Create quota templates
Change quota templates
Delete quota templates
Lock and unlock sites
Configure quotas with a second-stage Recycle Bin

Other Resources

Plan for site maintenance and management
Site Use Confirmation and Automatic Deletion: Stsadm properties