Remove office365 Group connection from Site Collection

Question

Has anyone successfully found a way to remove an Office365 group connection from a connected Site Collection. the site was created as a blank team site and connected in the UI to a new group using the settings option.

I cant seem to find any powershell or UI that gives me the option, the only thing I can see is all the extra site properties added in SharePoint Designer.

I want to save the site collection as a template and reuse it but it carries its Group connection when I recreate it.

Or maybe is there a way to simply associate the site with a different group after it has been created?

TIA

Answer 1

This was my experience dated 6 months ago: a site+group (basically an O365 group) had been deleted by mistake and logging a call with Microsoft, the engineer guided me to retrieve only the site (let's say resuscitate).

I ended up in the SharePoint queue and not in the exchange/o365 queue so the guy helped me retrieve the site portion (which was the one we wanted) and not the whole combo site+o365 group. If I had logged it in the right queue, we would have gotten back the whole combo.

So I ended up having the 'site' and not the inbox. This is my only experience of 'separating' what normally is not possible to separate. Keep in mind that clicking from the Site to anything that used to send you to the group ended up in an error message since the 2 were once joined and that part remained dead and inaccessible. We only needed the site part to take out some documents so we did not care about all functionalities being ok.

Not sure if this helps your cause, but I was able to get a site from a once joined site+group by deleting it and 'resurrecting' only the site part with powershell.

I would not do it in a normal scenario like yours because the risk of having something glitch is high and I would re-create the template in a normal site.

Answer 2

What has been shared by f1365 is not true as of 2019-10-23 You run Remove-SPOSiteGroup cmdlet to remove SharePoint Online group.

As of 2019-10-23 you cannot complete the following actions:

• Disconnect SharePoint Online from the group
• Change SharePoint Online connection from one group to another
• Connect SharePoint Online to an existing group

If you remove Office365 group which is connected to SharePoint Online site completely by running something like: Remove-AzureADGroup -ObjectId 50d28f25-b39d-4459-a05a-8257d28aef36 ;

Remove-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject -Id 50d28f25-b39d-4459-a05a-8257d28aef36

You'll likely get 404 error when trying to open corresponding SharePoint Online site:

Answer 3

In case anyone is interested. Now it's possible to do this using below PowerShell CMDLET.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/remove-spositegroup?view=sharepoint-ps

Remove-SPOSiteGroup -Site https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/marketing -Identity GroupToRemove