Forum Discussion
Exchange Online Archiving for Office 365 Limitations
Yesterday I faced a strange issue with MS support. A user of mine reached ~90GB of his online archive and I opened a support request to get it increased. The support enginner added additional 70GB. S...
Exactly! When promoting E3 to users, unlimited online archiving was one of the key features I highlight. Plus, if it is not really unlimited, then there's a serious concern as to the validity of TechNet articles. :(
Don't always (or ever) trust the marketing talk :) Anyways, afaik auto-expanding archives are indeed still rolling, and until this happens the most you get is the 70GB extra (so 170 total).
Hi Vasil,
Thank you for your input. I was refering this TechNet article for technical details as I do always. Like you said, I don't normally stop at details available up front on product page as they are always (if not, mostly) marketing stuff. TechNet have been a trusted repository for many years and for this instance also I turned to it for reference. I referred this URL: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exchange-online-limits.aspx#StorageLimits
As it says, for online archive in E3 there's no limit. The official blog post on Online Archiving announcement, (https://blogs.office.com/2015/06/03/announcing-auto-expanding-highly-scalable-archives-for-office-365-email/) was initially published on 6/3/2015. On 5/25/2016, the post was updated to reflect auto-expanding archives. But I believe since 2015 the unlimited archive option was available. If there was such 170GB limitation, they should really mention it without misleading people and specially us technical people who put our trust in technical documentation when it comes to having "the talk" with technical people at customer's end. Once the customer is on-boarded and requiring the feature they were hoping to get, it's really not ethical to say "yes we said it was available, but you don't get what we said. instead, you get only this much".
I don't know how many people have had or been having this issue. Do you know any trusted location where Microsoft publicly say that it's just 170GB or is it something they have been keeping within select audience and disclosed only if someone requested beyond that?
In my opinion, Microsoft should really be more responsible about what they promotes and provides. Too sad. :(
Regards,
Muditha
As has been noted earlier in this thread, the auto-expanding archive feature is rolling out. It takes time to deploy to all 12 Office 365 regions and the more-than-that-number Exchange Online forests. It just takes time... but it will get there. And yes, it has taken longer Microsoft much longer than they anticipated to roll out auto-expanding archives (for technical reasons). They might have updated customers on this topic but didn't. On the other hand, relatively few people have to go past 170 GB in an archives so few were affected. It's just life in the cloud.
TR
Hi Tony,
Thanks for the clarification here. :) I do understand there can be technical reasons that can make delays. And even the customer of this question was agreed to the fact that the auto expansion feature not being available to him and he didn't mind openning a support request and asking to increase.
Regardless of whether the user count is less or massive, if Microsoft say they actively offer the said product or service, they have to respect it. If automatic expansion is not availble, then at least through support requests the customer should be able to get the quota increased. When an organization decides on purchasing a product for their organization, they carefully consider if the feature he gets for the price he pay are worthy. In doing so, they expect to have what was told to be available to them when they need it.
In my opinion, what Microsoft should've done is, update their technical documentations with these constraints if they can only increase up to 170GB through a support request. That way, we would've had the awareness on the matter and informed the customer as well. It's sad that information critical like this are not available for people to refer and eventually people who expected the feature to be availble are in trouble. :(
Thanks,
Muditha
