Forum Discussion
Best practice for retiring users
You can actually customize this for up to 3650 days now, obviously I havent been able to confirm that first-hand :)
To expand (or maybe correct) on what C_the_S said, a mailbox that's put on hold can be provisioned as Inactive mailbox, allowing you do indefinitely preserve the content for no charge: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn144876(v=exchg.150).aspx
However, in order to actually make the mailbox Inactive, you need to remove the user account. Simply removing the license does not make the mailbox Inactive, instead it will be kept as is because of the hold setting (and will generate an entry in the "users with errors" view). It will also not prevent people from sending new messages to said mailbox.
If you want to keep the data around for quicker access (as getting it out of Inactive mailboxes takes some effort), a better option might be to convert the mailbox to shared.
Their boss, as defined in Active Directory, will get an email with a link and then they have a week (or maybe it's 30 days now??) to get files out of it before it is removed.
You can actually customize this for up to 3650 days now, obviously I havent been able to confirm that first-hand :)
To expand (or maybe correct) on what C_the_S said, a mailbox that's put on hold can be provisioned as Inactive mailbox, allowing you do indefinitely preserve the content for no charge: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn144876(v=exchg.150).aspx
However, in order to actually make the mailbox Inactive, you need to remove the user account. Simply removing the license does not make the mailbox Inactive, instead it will be kept as is because of the hold setting (and will generate an entry in the "users with errors" view). It will also not prevent people from sending new messages to said mailbox.
If you want to keep the data around for quicker access (as getting it out of Inactive mailboxes takes some effort), a better option might be to convert the mailbox to shared.