You are assigned a new project and you want to get ahead and organized, so you create a new workspace; only to realize that one already exists, or the project is a channel within an existing team. Your newly created workspace is then quickly forgotten and is left empty and unused. Over time, these empty sites build up and create unnecessary clutter.
How to identify empty sites and teams
Using the out of the box tools available, it's possible to do basic identification of empty sites. Third-party tools enable advanced identification.
Basic identification
Empty SharePoint site
SharePoint sites, both group and non-group sites, are considered empty when they contain less than 25MB of data.
Note: 25MB of data is used as a metric because sites with templates applied to them consume storage even when empty. By using this measure, some sites may not be picked up in the report.
Empty Team
A team is considered to be empty when there are no channel messages, and the connected SharePoint site contains less than 25MB of data.
Advanced identification
Workspaces are regarded as empty if:
- There are no files present in document libraries in the SharePoint site. Folders are not regarded as content, so if there is a folder structure but no files, the site is regarded as empty.
- There are no conversations in the team.
- There is only a single content page (logically the home page) in the Site Pages library of the SharePoint site. More than one page indicates the presence of content.
Method 1 – Admin centers
At the time of writing this article, no out of the box functionality exists within the various admin centers to report on empty workspaces.
As a workaround, from the SharePoint admin center, export all workspaces into a CSV. From the CSV, format your data into a table and sort the ‘StorageUsageCurrent’ column from smallest to largest. Anything below 25MB can be considered to likely be empty and will require investigation.
Method 2 – PowerShell
Managing empty teams and group-connected sites
Before you run one of the following commandlets, you will need to ensure that you have the Exchange, Teams and SharePoint administrator roles, have the PnP.PowerShell module installed, authorized, and connected.
To report on the empty teams and group-connected sites in your tenant, you can use the following PowerShell script: Empty group-connected sites and teams report
Note: To successfully determine if a team does not have any channel messages, you will need to have Owner or Member-level access to the team.
Managing duplicate SharePoint sites without groups
Before you run one of the following commandlets, you will need to ensure that you have the SharePoint administrator role, have the PnP.PowerShell module installed, authorized, and connected.
To report on the empty SharePoint sites without groups in your tenant, you can use the following PowerShell script: Empty sites without groups report
*Note: this script excludes all group connected sites and teams channel sites.
Method 3 – Third-party tool
SProbot's empty workspace cleanup tool uses AI to find all SharePoint sites and teams which do not contain any content except for the default lists, libraries and home page.
Conclusion
Removing empty workspaces minimizes the amount of clutter on your tenant improves user experience, making it easier for them to find content and collaborate without having to figure out what the appropriate site or team is.
Reporting on empty teams can be tricky due to the need for the user executing the scripts to have member or owner-level access to every team in the tenant, so an all-in-one reporting and cleanup tool can be useful.
