Forum Discussion
In Place Archiving After Employee Leaves
Our existing Microsoft 365 Business Standard licenses includes 50Gb of online archiving and once an Employee leaves, if we convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox, we LOSE all that email. Only option would be to export to PST first yet have no where in the cloud to store such a large individual file (due to all of the SharePoint restrictions and tiny drives we have on our clients).
So we are upgrading our top users to the E3 which gives us unlimited online archiving, yet are being told if that employee leaves, we'll also lose all that email unless we export to PST.
Microsoft is selling us on the whole E3 and archiving so we don't ever have to use such an old feature such as PST files yet they never seem to understand that Employees leave. Why should we lose all of our cloud stored emails because no longer want the account to be active? Keep paying us or lose all your emails.
There must be another way?
9 Replies
- Not sure on the limitations of a business license but it should be possible to put the account on a case hold which would preserve the mailbox data until the hold is removed, at which point you can delete or disable the user account.
- Litigation hold is a bit different than a case hold, this is applied from the compliance centre rather than Exchange. In our case the account was completely deleted (mails recovered about 6months later) rather than unlicensed but the principle is the same.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/security-and-compliance/in-place-and-litigation-holds#deleting-a-mailbox-on-hold
