In time, you will add and remove users from the Active Directory (AD) associated with your SharePoint or Microsoft 365 environments.
When you remove users from AD, they become orphaned users, and their permissions remain even though they no longer have access to your environment.
We recommend that you remove these permissions to:
Keep your permissions more organized and manageable.
Prevent returning users from accessing old content they worked on before they left.
For example, a contract employee returns to work on a new project, you reactivate his AD account, and he suddenly has access to old project files he worked on before.
Prerequisites
You have site collection admin permissions on your targeted site collection(s).
Note: Site collection admin permissions are required, even if you have higher admin privileges, such as SharePoint admin or Global admin. For more information, see Microsoft administrative permissions.
Tip: To manage all your site collections, you can connect to your central admin or admin center with SharePoint admin, Farm admin, or Global admin permissions.
How-To
Click Explore in the sidebar.
Select the item to update.
Select Clean orphaned users in the Quick actions menu.
From the dropdown, select All orphaned users, or Specific users to search for and select users.
Do one of the following:
Click Clean now to run the action immediately.
Click Schedule to run the action at a later time.
Click Tasks in the sidebar to see the results, including warnings and errors.
Considerations
Clean orphaned users does not remove the assigned metadata within your lists and libraries. For example, if an orphaned user is the creator of a library, their name will still appear in the Created by field after running this action.
If you use a custom authentication provider, orphaned users detection will not be available because ShareGate Migrate communicates with the authentication provider to determine if the user account is still available.
External users can be temporarily flagged as orphaned users when created due to a short time lapse between Azure Active Directory and SharePoint that prevents synchronization.
If you want to clean all your orphaned users, we recommend running an Orphaned user report on your target first. The report ensures that ShareGate Migrate correctly identifies orphaned users before the Clean action runs.
Working with large numbers of orphaned users
If your environment has a large number of orphaned users (roughly 5,000 or more), selecting all items may cause ShareGate Migrate to become unresponsive for several minutes.
To work around this, process orphaned users in smaller batches by limiting the scope of the operation rather than selecting all items at once.