How to Archive Team in Microsoft Teams

In Microsoft Teams, teams are created for various needs. Over time, created teams might fall out of use. For example,

• In an organization, when a project ends.
• In education centers, when an academic year ends.

Those teams are no longer active. So, admins can either delete or archive those teams. Deleting teams will delete all its data like chats, files, associated site collection, etc.

Archived teams can be unarchived (i.e., reactivated) in the future. So, we recommend team archiving and postponing deletion until you are sure that it is no longer needed.

You can archive a team to keep files and govern information. When a team is archived,

1. All its activities are frozen.
2. Conversations and files in the team become read-only.
3. However, members can be added or removed to the team to provide or restrict access.

You can have any of the below roles to archive teams in Microsoft Teams.

• Teams service admin
• Team owner

Teams can be archived in many ways. Let’s see all the methods.

• Archive teams from Microsoft Teams
• Archive teams from Teams admin center
• Archive team using PowerShell
• Archive teams in Bulk using PowerShell

Follow the below steps in MS Teams. You must be a team owner to make these changes.

1. Select ‘Teams’ on the left to view the list of your teams
2. Select the ‘Manage Team’ gear icon at the bottom
3. In the list of teams, select a team by clicking the ‘More option’.
4. Select ‘Archive team’.

Teams admins can follow the below steps in the Teams admin center.

1. In the Microsoft Teams admin center, select Teams –> Manage Teams.
2. Select a team by clicking the team’s name
3. Select Archive.

The above-given methods are useful for small organizations. But that is not feasible for large organizations. You can use PowerShell to archive a team or list of teams.

The PowerShell cmdlet Set-TeamArchivedState is used to set the archive in a team.

You must connect to Microsoft Teams PowerShell to use the above cmdlet.

To archive a team, run the following cmdlet.

Set-TeamArchivedState –GroupId <team’s group id> -Archived:$true 

To view team’s group id, you can use the Get-Team cmdlet.

To archive a list of teams using CSV input, you can use the below script. It will be useful for universities or schools to archive bulk teams when an academic year ends.

$TeamNames=Import-CSV –Header “TeamName” <CSVFilePath> 
Foreach($TeamName in $TeamNames)  
{  
 $Name=$TeamName.TeamName  
 $ID=(Get-Team -DisplayName $Name).GroupId  
 Write-Host Enabling archive for $Name -ForegroundColor Yellow 
 Set-TeamArchivedState –GroupId $ID -Archived:$true | Out-Null 
} 
Write-Host Archive enabled for teams in the CSV file -ForegroundColor Green 

To get all the archived teams in the Microsoft Teams, you can use the following PowerShell cmdlet.

Get-Team | where {$_.Archived -eq $true} 

It will list team name, id, visibility, description, and mail nickname.

By referring to the archived teams report, you can unarchive the team anytime.

To restore an archived team in Microsoft Teams, you can use GUI or PowerShell cmdlet.

To make an archived team active, follow the below steps

1. In the Microsoft Teams admin center, select Teams –> Manage Teams.
2. Select a team by clicking the team’s name
3. Select Unarchive.

To reactivate the archived team using PowerShell, run the following cmdlet

Set-TeamArchivedState –GroupId <team’s group id> -Archived:$false 

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I hope this blog will help you in managing teams’ archives. If you have any queries or requirements, you can share them with us in the comment section.