There comes a time in the life of every Office 365 tenant where you need to do some house cleaning. In this case we are going to delete whole SharePoint Online Site Collection.

This means all the sites, apps, sub site, web parts, everything is going to be deleted. Note, I’ll be showing you how to do this for an M and E plans. The P or Small Business Plans only have a single private site collection and in most cases you probably don’t want to delete that! However, given the flexibility of both M and E plans to create multiple private Site Collections it means that you may need to clean house now and again.

You’ll need to be an Office 365 administrator to do this and for this post we’ll do our deleting via the web console. Login to the Office 365 portal and select the Admin option in the top right of the window and then SharePoint from the drop down menu that appears.

This will take you to the SharePoint Admin Center as shown above where you can see a list of all your Site Collections.

From the list of Site Collections place a check to the left of the one you wish to delete. You should then find the Delete button is available on the Ribbon Menu at the top of the screen. Press the Delete button to remove the Site Collection.

You’ll receive the above warning asking you to confirm the deletion. You’ll see that the deleted Site Collection will remain in a Recycle Bin for 30 days allowing you to recover it if necessary. Beyond that it is gone for good.

Press the Delete button to proceed.

In the top right of the window you will see the message about the Site Collection being deleted and then a message when the process is complete.

The Site Collection will no longer appear the the list in the SharePoint Admin Center.

But if you now go to the Recycle Bin via the Ribbon Menu it should appear as you see above. You can from there recover it for up to 30 days if desired.

I get a lot of questions about workflows and SharePoint Designer. You will see that I did a series of blog posts on that topic:

Creating a SharePoint Workflow

You’ve read the blog posts now see the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-P-4YR6dw

Hopefully, all these will show you how easy it is to get into workflows for SharePoint Online.

As with most areas with technology, the rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it. SharePoint Designer is a very, very powerful tool that can create some really amazing things when it comes to workflows and SharePoint site design. Best of all SharePoint Designer is free.

So if you have been meaning to get your feet wet with automation in SharePoint Online, hopefully all this material will get you off the blocks to a flying start.