Immediate ROI From SharePoint Advanced Management

It has been announced that Microsoft will automatically archive unlicensed OneDrive storage starting in January 2025.

AWESOME!! What does that mean? Well… If your company just unlicenses users rather than deleting them, the automated job that deletes their OneDrive sites does not run. So, that space just sits there. Many companies do this because, I’m absolutely SHOCKED ?????? to learn, users share critical documents from their OneDrive rather than putting them into a Team or SharePoint site.

There are also other, more technical reasons to do this. Companies that are highly regulated or are in highly litigious industries use this technique to make their eDiscovery easier. When you delete a user, it deletes their user object. You notice this when you try to look up old chats with a co-worker who has left the company and you can’t search for their name anymore.

Well, that also happens at the eDiscovery interface. So, when you go to search for all emails by Matt Meyer, that object isn’t found. Fail City, population YOU. You can find the email by using the email metadata, but it isn’t as accurate as using the user object.

Back to the case at hand, all that data that was sitting in those unlicensed OneDrive sites is now going to be archived, and you will have to pay $0.05/GB/month to store them. Not bad, right? Well… because they are archived, you won’t have access to the data any longer. You will need to un-archive it in order to get at that data. There is, of course, a charge for that: $0.60/GB. Oh, yeah, you can’t granularly un-archive the files. You have to un-archive the entire site.

Meyer, you say, quit messing around and get to the ROI stuff!! I’m getting there! Hold your horses!!

By getting your first administrative license of SharePoint Advanced Management, you are able to run reports. One of those reports is Unlicensed OneDrive space usage. It comes along with a downloadable report that states the user associated with the site along with how large their OneDrive sites are. Very handy.

So, for the low investment of $3/User/month, you have located where you have OneDrive space being consumed by unlicensed users. You can also use other reports to see what documents are being shared where, so that you can move those files into their proper place and send out new sharing links.

You just saved your company money by taking care of wasted space consumption, archival costs, and rehydration costs, as well as the human time investment to make all of that un-archival happen. YOU ARE A HERO!!!