Microsoft's native Teams Activity Report keeps workspaces artificially alive because even a single chat message, a reaction, or joining a meeting counts as "activity." Teams where no one has edited a document in months continue to appear active — and are never archived. Extended Archiving in Valprovia Governance solves this problem by basing the archiving decision on SharePoint Search Queries (KQL), using actual document activity as the benchmark.
If you're an IT administrator managing hundreds of Microsoft Teams and notice that the native inactivity report barely flags any Teams as inactive — even though half of them are clearly no longer in productive use — you need a more precise mechanism to detect genuine inactivity.
In enterprise environments, a significant share of all Microsoft Teams workspaces is effectively inactive. Each of these ghost Teams continues to consume storage, retains active permissions, and poses a potential security and compliance risk. Microsoft's own Advanced Collaboration Analytics now includes an "Inactive Teams" view — a clear signal that Microsoft recognizes the problem as systemically relevant. The sprawl created during the 2020–2021 remote-work wave remains unresolved in many organizations.
The core issue: IT teams lack a reliable signal to distinguish genuinely inactive workspaces from active ones. The native Microsoft report shows activity where no productive work is happening. Without precise data, automated archiving rules don't trigger — and manually reviewing hundreds or thousands of Teams is not a realistic approach.
The consequences extend beyond IT. For decision-makers, Teams sprawl means uncontrolled licensing and storage costs, a growing attack surface from abandoned permissions, and in the worst case, compliance violations because sensitive project data sits in unmanaged workspaces.
Microsoft's Teams Activity Report — available via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center — records every interaction in the Teams client as activity. This includes: chat messages, channel posts, replies, reactions, mentions, meeting attendance, calls, and file shares.
The weakness lies in the breadth of this definition. Microsoft measures activity at the team level using communication metrics, not productivity metrics. In concrete terms:
A team where one member posts a reaction once a month is counted as equally active as a team with daily project work. Automated notifications from connectors, system messages, and bot interactions also generate activity signals. Even simply opening a Teams channel can in some cases be counted as activity.
According to Practical365, using the Teams Usage Report to identify inactive Teams is simply "not good enough." Microsoft's report only shows data for the last 28 days. A team that has been completely inactive for more than 90 days disappears from the report — but a team with minimal, non-productive activity remains visible and is incorrectly classified as "in use."
What the report does not answer: Was the SharePoint library of this team actually used for document work? Were files edited, content updated, project deliverables created? These questions are often more relevant for archiving decisions than whether someone sent a chat message.