Deleting (an Orphaned) SharePoint 2010 Meeting Workspace using PowerShell

I was recently asked to delete an orphaned meeting workspace for a client.  I couldn’t find anyone who’d done this before on the old Google box on the internet machine, so I decided to write something for myself, using PowerShell.

I did this by using the following PowerShell script (using the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell on a server in the SharePoint farm – not a traditional PowerShell console).

Start by getting a reference to the site (web).

PS C:Usersspfulladmin> $web = Get-SPWeb "[my url]" <—This needs to be the URL to the meeting workspace (such as http://server/teams/meetingworkspace)

Next, since I didn’t know exactly what list I wanted to modify, I retrieved a collections of all the lists in the site.

PS C:Usersspfulladmin> $web.Lists | select Title, BaseType

Title                                           BaseType
—–                                           ——–
Agenda                                          GenericList
Attendees                                       GenericList
Document Library                                DocumentLibrary
fpdatasources                                   DocumentLibrary
Master Page Gallery                             DocumentLibrary
Meeting Series                                  GenericList
Objectives                                      GenericList
Site Assets                                     DocumentLibrary
Site Pages                                      DocumentLibrary
Things To Bring                                 GenericList
Workflow Tasks                                  GenericList
Workspace Pages                                 DocumentLibrary

For meeting workspaces, the list we want to modify is “Meeting Series”, so we’ll select the items in that list.

PS C:Usersspfulladmin> $items = $web.Lists["Meeting Series"].items

Now that we have the collection of items, we want to find out which index in the list we need to get (like in most programming languages, indexes start at 0, not 1).

PS C:Usersspfulladmin> $items | select Title

Title
—–
dd2
Group Call

In this case, our orphaned meeting was named “dd2”, so we now know it’s at index 0. 

PS C:Usersspfulladmin> $items[0].title
dd2

The next step is to simply select that item, and delete it.

PS C:Usersspfulladmin> $items[0].delete()

Now let’s verify that the item is truly gone.

PS C:Usersspfulladmin> $items | select Title

Title
—–
Group Call

And that’s it.  Your orphaned meeting is cleaned up and will no longer appear for you in your meeting workspace.