Manage sub sites lifecycle

Question

I am looking for options to manage the proliferation of sub-sites under our site collections for our Intranet. Right now the creation of site collections is done by IT, but we want the ability to delegate the creation of subsites to the business groups.

Is Site Use Confirmation and Deletion under CA/Application Management/Site Collections the only option? If so, does it only deal with the site collections? The ultimate goal would be to allow site collection owners to create sub-sites, and then retire/delete those sites after a set time without some sort of renewal.

Additional goal is to not use a third party tool.

Answer 1

Site Use and Confirmation is at the site collection level. Since the business owners know how long the site needs to be used, they know when it should be deleted and would have the ability to do so through the UI.

Just bake that into the govenrance plan, "As a site collection owner, it is your responsibility to remove sites that have reached the end of their lifecycle."

To me, it's part of being a site owner and doesn't require a lot of overthinking.

Answer 2

My solution for same problem was:

1. List of sites on root site
2. Workflow (with custom action) that creates sites when added list item
3. Workflow (with cusotm action) to confirm usage or export site and delete it
4. Information Management Policy on list items to start deletition workflow after time period