Last Updated on October 28, 2021 by Rakesh Gupta

Archiving a Chatter group suspends the ability to create new posts or share files with the group, while retaining the group feed and files for future reference.This feature available in Developer, Performance, Enterprise, Professional, Contact Manager, Group and Unlimited editions.

The best example I can discuss here is, To streamline sales activity for a critical project, Sales manager created a Chatter group and added their sales team members to it, but after few weeks Organization won the deal and then the Sales Manager don’t want to use this Chatter group any more but from the other side he wants to keep all the discussion for future reference. So archiving Chatter Group is fantastic feature for this.

By default Chatter groups are set to archive automatically if there are no new feed posts or comments for 90 consecutive days. Group members don’t receive email notifications when a  Chatter group they own, manage, or belong to is archived or activated.Even though Chatter group is archived user can perform few actions like

1. Joining or leaving the group
2. Commenting on an existing post
3. Mentioning users, searching feeds
4. Searching via global search
5. Reporting remains available

I have written a few articles on Chatter. Why not check them out while you are at it?!

1. Post Announcements in Chatter Groups
2. Customize Branding for Chatter Email Notifications

Enabling or Disabling Archiving for Chatter Groups

By default archiving is enabled for Chatter groups. To disable or re-enable it for your organization perform the steps below:

1. Click on Setup | Feature Settings | Chatter | Chatter Settings.
2. Click on the Edit button.
3. Select Allow Group Archiving to allow automatic and manual archiving for groups. 
4. Click Save.

👉 Disabling archiving prevents automatic and manual archiving of groups, but previously archived groups weren’t activated. If required, group owners, group managers, or users with the “Modify All Data”permission can activate groups, even if archiving is disabled.

Archiving Chatter Groups

By default Chatter groups are set to archive automatically if there are no new feed posts or comments for 90 consecutive days. To manually archive Chatter Groups follow the below steps

1. Click Edit Group from the buttons in the group header.
2. It will redirect you to Group setting edit  Page, there you can configure archiving for the group in one of two ways mentioned below
   1. Click on Archive button to archive the group right away.
   2. Select Archive this group if there are no posts or comments for 90 days radio button from Automatic Archiving else select Don’t automatically archive this group if you want to avoid automatic archiving of Chatter Group.
3. Click Save.

Activating Archived Chatter Groups

To activate archived Chatter groups follow the steps below:

1. Open the Chatter Group that you want to activate, you can use My Archived Groups filter on the Groups tab to get all archived Chatter groups.
2. On the Chatter Group detail page or the group setting page click on Activate Group button.You can only activate one group at a time.
3. To activate multiple groups at once, use the Salesforce API.

This to Remember

1. All Chatter groups count toward this limit, including archived groups. For example, if you’re a member of 90 groups, of which 10 are archived, you can only request to join 10 more groups.( Maximum Group a user can Join – 300).
2. You can’t mentioned archived Chatter groups in post or comments.
3. Archived groups still count toward the organization group limit (30,000).
4. Archived groups don’t count toward your group membership limit. For example, if you’re a member of 300 groups, of which 10 are archived, you can request to join 10 more groups.
5. Group members don’t receive email notifications when a Chatter group they own, manage, or belong to is archived or activated.

Formative Assessment:

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