Group Life Cycle Management Using Graph PowerShell

Managing Microsoft 365 Groups efficiently is crucial for maintaining a secure, clutter-free, and well-organized cloud environment. With the rapid pace of collaboration and group creation, unused or stale groups can accumulate quickly—leading to unnecessary complexity and potential risks.

That's where Group Life Cycle Management steps in—and with Graph PowerShell, you can automate and streamline the entire process.

What is Microsoft 365 Group Life Cycle Policy?

A Group Life Cycle Policy in Microsoft 365 helps organizations automate the expiration and clean-up of unused Microsoft 365 groups. These policies define how long a group can remain active and what happens when it reaches its expiration period.

Admins can:

• Set expiration time for groups.
• Send notifications before group expiry.
• Allow users to renew or extend group life.

This ensures that inactive or unnecessary groups are automatically removed—saving resources and reducing clutter.

Why Manage Microsoft 365 Group Life Cycle Policy Using Graph PowerShell?

While Microsoft 365 admin centers provide a user interface to manage group expiration, Graph PowerShell allows you to:

• Automate expiration policy enforcement.
• Create, update, or delete policies at scale.
• Integrate group lifecycle management into broader IT automation workflows.

Using Graph PowerShell gives IT administrators precise control and scripting flexibility to manage group policies more dynamically.

How to Manage Microsoft 365 Group Life Cycle Policy Using Graph PowerShell?

Below are the primary tasks involved in managing group lifecycle policies—with links to ready-to-use scripts and guides hosted on M365Corner.

• Fetch Group Life Cycle Policy Details

Before applying or modifying a lifecycle policy, it's essential to audit the existing configurations.

Use the Get-MgGroupLifecyclePolicy cmdlet to retrieve all existing group lifecycle policies along with their details.

👉 Learn how to fetch group lifecycle policies using PowerShell in this guide:

How to use Get-MgGroupLifecyclePolicy

• Create a Group Life Cycle Policy

To define expiration settings for Microsoft 365 groups, use the New-MgGroupLifecyclePolicy cmdlet. You can specify:

• Group lifetime in days,
• Notification emails for renewal,
• Whether the policy applies to all or specific groups.

👉 Step-by-step instructions to create a new lifecycle policy:

How to use New-MgGroupLifecyclePolicy

• Delete an Existing Group Life Cycle Policy

If a policy is no longer needed, you can remove it using the Remove-MgGroupLifecyclePolicy cmdlet. This is useful during policy cleanups or when replacing old rules with updated ones.

👉 Here’s how to delete an existing group lifecycle policy using Graph PowerShell:

How to use Remove-MgGroupLifecyclePolicy

Conclusion

Managing the lifecycle of Microsoft 365 groups is vital to ensure data hygiene, reduce clutter, and maintain a secure collaboration environment. With Microsoft Graph PowerShell, you can fully automate group lifecycle policies—right from creation to deletion.

Whether you're looking to audit existing policies, enforce group expiration, or clean up unused groups, the tools and scripts available through M365Corner simplify the entire process.