Administrators can give permissions to users to create their own sites for projects, groups or whatever other need they may require. A lot of times, these sites will be abandonned because the project is complete, the group has disbanded, or it was just never used. Windows Sharepoint Services allows you to automatically email site administrators to have them verify that the site is still in use.

Sharepoint sites will take up space on servers and it is a best practice to verify if all the sites are still being used or if they have become inactive. SharePoint Services allow you to automatically send a notice to a site owner asking them to confirm that the sites that they have created are in use. You can also delete unconfirmed sites automatically allowing you to control the unused sites on the Sharepoint server. When a site is created, it is added to the database and marked active.

After an administrator set time period, an email is sent to the creator with links to confirm the site is still active, or to delete the site. If the site is still in use, the recipient simply clicks the link which re-marks the site as active and the timer is restarted. If the site is no longer in use and the recipient clicks the link to delete the site, it is deleted. If the site is not in use and the recipient does not click the link, they will be sent follow-up emails, the number of which is also administrator specified. If automatic deletion is enabled and the site owner has not confirmed the site is active, once this number is exceeded, the site will be deleted. Automatic deletion can delete unneeded sites without any requiring anything from the administrator but to prevent accidental site deletion you must enable the site confirmation before you enable automatic deletion.

Before you go setting up automatic deletion you should be aware of some best practices to follow.

• Require the creation of a secondary contact when creating a site 
• Set reasonable intervals between confirmations and before automatic deletion. 
• Back up Web sites regularly, so you can restore a recent copy if a site is unintentionally deleted. 
• Configuring Site Use Confirmation and Deletion

When configuring site confirmation and automatic deletion, there are default values set that you may wish to use, these defaults are:

To enable Site Use Confirmation and Automatic Deletion begin by opening up the Sharepoint Central Administration page located at http://servename:15655 and click on the Configure Virtual Server Settings link. Click on the virtual server you would like to administer and then click on Configure Site Collection Use Confirmation and Deletion.

You will be shown the screen above where you can configure confirmation and automatic deletion. You can customize the notification text as well. There are two notification messages, one for site confirmation and one for site confirmation and automatic deletion. The text of the message is stored in \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LCID\XML\DEADWEB.XML, where LCID is the locale ID. Only an administrator on the server can edit this file.

For more information see:

Backing Up and Restoring WSS Sites