In this post we want to highlight some upcoming changes around license re-assignment in Exchange Online to help admins get clarity on mailbox behavior and how license re-assignment works. The new beh...
Published Mar 21, 2022
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Couple of questions around this, where some of the other comments/questions have already touched on, but trying to bring it all together seeing that we have a combination of things happening.
First, our identities originate on-prem and we sync via AAD Connect to AAD. For mailbox creation, we Enable-RemoteMailbox the on-prem AD account and license the account, so when the account sync'd to AAD, a mailbox is provisioned correctly.
Second, we have an Information Governance Retention Policy applied to all mailboxes, specifically to ensure deleted data is retained for 3 years.
With our termination process, that originates on-prem by effectively removing the terminated employee from the AAD Sync. When this occurs, the account goes into deleted status in AAD for 30 days. This also puts the mailbox in soft-deleted state where it remains for duration of the 3 year retention policy period.
Our experience has been even >30 days, re-adding the user to Sync will re-activate the AAD account, re-license the account and the mailbox is automatically re-attached with all the mail in the original mailbox.
The question here is whether this behavior is changing now? If we re-add the user to the AAD Sync >30 days post termination, is this going to create a new mailbox with no data for this user, even with the retention policy in place for the soft-deleted mailbox? If so, what are the options to re-attach or recover the data in the original mailbox?