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Is there a way to determine if a managed property can safely be removed from Search in the SPO Admin Center?

For example, I have "UnitOWSTEXT". It has no crawled property mapped to it. Is this the only criteria I have to check for to make sure it's not used in any other way in the tenant?

And by the way, can you even remove a managed property in SPO? I read somewhere that in SP Server you would have to create a new search service application for that.

Thanks for you reply.

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  • There is nothing stopping you from deleting managed properties that you create but I assume these are automatically created properties that you want to delete? I can't think of a reason why you would want to do that. If you don't want people to use them remove the queryable and retrievable flags. – Bunzab Dec 19 '17 at 8:16
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There is no OOB method to check if it’s safe to remove a managed property. In actually, if we delete a managed property:

  1. Users can't search on the property.

  2. A query rule that uses the property no longer works.

  3. A custom web part that uses the property no longer works.

You can check the points above to estimate if the managed property will impact the relevant function.

However, as Bunzab said, there are some automatic created managed property in the search schema, I suggest you not removing them.

To reduce the performance impact of managed property, you can deselect the Searchable, Queryable, Retrievable checkboxes.

Besides, we can delete a managed property from tenant and site collection level in SharePoint Online.

More information refer to the article: Manage the search schema in SharePoint Online

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  • Thanks for the answers. I found that sone managed properties are greyed out and that the respective drop-down menu doesn't offer the option to delete them. Any idea why some managed properties cannot be deleted? – colonel_claypoo Dec 20 '17 at 13:17

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