Decommissioning

Gimmal's Decommissioning enables you to remove SharePoint sites and collections in a consistent, policy-adherent manner with additional options for disposition and notification. The Decommissioning Help consists of a Feature-Activated (FA) and Provider-Hosted (PH) version. Click the folder for the desired environment to see the related configuration information.

Gimmal's Decommissioning product governs site proliferation by determining an end-state for site collections and/or sites in SharePoint. The product enables you to transfer list and library content to any SharePoint list and library, archive list items and document items to an on-premise installation, and archive list content (e.g., a .CSV spreadsheet with list items and metadata). Decommissioning enables administrators to configure a definition that can be applied to a site collection or to an individual site. This definition serves to control the active lifespan of a site collection or an individual site. Decommissioning can also be paired with Gimmal's Provisioning product so that site creation and Decommission can be defined at the onset, reducing site proliferation and offering proactive governance controls.

The Decommissioning definition contains a site steward, an action date, and an action. When the definition is first created, its state is Created.

• Site Steward: A site steward is a SharePoint user who reviews Decommimssioning definitions and approves site decommissioning events.
• Action Date: The date that a Decommissioning definition is triggered (i.e., put into a Pending state)
• Action: The Decommissioning action to be taken once the definition has changed from "Pending" to "Submitted". There are two supported actions: Quarantine and Delete.

It remains in Created state until one of two events occur:

1. Decommissioning puts the definition into Pending state. This happens automatically when the action date is reached. At this point, the definition is considered "active", but nothing else is done to either the definition or the site. It is intended that the site steward will periodically review the definition states using the Decommissioning Administration page or the Decommissioning – Definitions list page, and promote the definition to the next step in the process. In any case, no action is taken automatically when a definition is changed to Pending – it is just waiting.
2. The Decommissioning site steward manually submits the definition for decommissioning.

The time period for when a definition is submitted for decommissioning is expected to be months or years from the time the definition was initially created. It follows that the most logical time for a site steward to determine how to process the site should be at the end of the site's useful life, since content changes should be minimal at the time. Therefore, the Decommissioning process includes an expectation that someone will review and modify the definition as necessary before submitting it for decommissioning. (Note that you can prevent content changes from occurring altogether by invoking a Quarantine action first. See the next section for more information.)

When a definition is submitted for decommissioning, it is no longer editable and its state is set to Submitted. The next time the Decommissioning job runs, it will decommission the site according to the action specified on the definition. The supported actions are:

• Quarantine – All user access is removed, except that of the site collection administrator
• Delete – The site and all artifacts are removed and the site is permanently deleted

Decommissioning a site overrides any site policies. With respect to holds in place, Decommissioning will follow out-of-the-box behavior when deleting sites that have content on hold. Sites with standard in-place holds on content will be deleted. Sites with content under a preservation hold or an eDiscovery in-place hold will not be deleted.It is a best practice to query for such items and move/archive them before you begin the decommissioning process. For information on moving/archiving items, see Creating Decommissioning Send To Locations (link).

Integration with Governance Hub

Decommissioning is integrated with Gimmal's Governance Hub, which is a mandatory prerequisite for installing Decommissioning. Governance Hub is a configuration management application that provides a single location to configure and manage installed Gimmal software such as Decommissioning.

Governance Hub is a mandatory prerequisite for installing Decommissioning. For more information, see Governance Hub Configuration Overview. For information on installing Governance Hub, see the Installing Content Governance section for your environment (FA or PH).