Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Site policies in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint sites rarely seem to be deleted even when they are not used anymore. This makes that the number of sites (and also the required space) can increase very quickly in a SharePoint environment. Site policies in SharePoint 2013 are designed to keep the number of sites in your SharePoint environment under control. It allows you to define through a policy when a site can be closed (and afterwards possibly deleted).

 You can define site policies for a site collection in the root site; these site policies are then available to all sites in the site collection. Go to Site Collection Administration and underneath the Site Settings section you will find the Site Policies page.  Although the documentation on MSDN - Overview of site policies in SharePoint 2013 -  states that there are 4 site policy options – the fourth one – run a workflow - is not available any more as this option has been removed in the final release – this leaves us with 3 options:
  1. Do not close or delete site automatically. This policy option specifies that the site owner must manually delete the site.
  2. Delete sites automatically. This policy option specifies that a site owner can close the site manually, but the site will be deleted automatically based on the deletion event settings specified.
  3. Close and delete sites automatically. This policy option has the same choices as the preceding setting, for deleting sites automatically, but it also enables you to specify how long after a site’s creation date the site will be closed.
Since site policies are defined at site collection, SharePoint provides a mechanism to push out site policies across site collections using the content type hub. For more details on this check out this excellent blog post  – Site policy in SharePoint 2013


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