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Exchange Team Blog
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Introducing Exchange Online Delicensing Resiliency to protect against unintended delicensing actions

The_Exchange_Team's avatar
The_Exchange_Team
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Nov 05, 2024
We recently introduced a new feature in Exchange Online that allows admins to add protection against the accidental or unintended delicensing of an Exchange Online mailboxes by providing a 30-day gra...
Delic01.jpg
Updated Nov 07, 2024
Version 2.0
announcements
exchange online
Tips 'n Tricks
Sonai91's avatar
Sonai91
Copper Contributor

So what I can understand:

  • The facility will be useful/beneficial for those tenants who does not have any customized retention policy enabled (In Place Hold, Litigation Hold, Retention Tags). I can hardly believe any tenant still relying on Microsoft's default retention policies.
  • Additionally this feature will not make any difference if the license is removed in less than 24 hours, as the mailbox will still be accessible in unlicensed state for ~24hrs. due to provision delay.

Therefore, justifying to the client can be a little cumbersome to the admins and the plan may get parked in those cases.

Let me know if I am wrong from my viewpoint.

Yajvendra's avatar
Yajvendra
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Nov 29, 2024

Hold is used to prevent mailbox content from being permanently deleted, so that organization can retain content to meet compliance regulations or during legal and other types of investigations hence Hold being critical functionality is mostly not override by any feature. Additionally, to place an Exchange Online mailbox on Litigation hold, it must be assigned an Exchange Online Plan 2 license.

Whereas this feature is defence in depth to prevent losing access to mailbox in the event of un-intended delicensing. The feature is applicable to all Exchange Online licenses excluding trial licenses. If no action taken, then the mailbox access will expire after the feature’s 30-day grace period is over.

So, Hold is for mailbox data retention/preservation vs the new feature is for mailbox access retention for 30 days only.