Forum Discussion
O365 email archive migration
What you can do is create the departed users and license them and put them on hold. Perform the migration of data and then remove the licenses. This will require you to temporarily own the number of licenses equivalent to the users archives to be migrated however you do not need to maintain them in perpetuity. jameslee-atg
Rob, that method puts you in a license violation situation. Every mailbox that's under hold needs to have a valid license assigned, the only way to get this to work without license is to either convert the mailbox to shared (which will still require a license if you put it on hold to ensure data immutability, or dump more than 50GB in it), or make the mailbox Inactive.
jameslee-atg there are vendors that specialize in this type of migration, look them up online.
Not sure that is the case. I have many enterprise customers who have E3 or E5 licenses who put people on litigation hold all the time and then when the person leaves you can remove the license. If that wasn't the case then a financial company who has a regulatory requirement to retain mail for 7 years would have to retain licenses for every user that ever worked there for the last 7 years. Part of what you get in an Exchange Plan 2 license is the ability to put a mailbox on permanent hold. You can not access the mailbox through the Exchange/Outlook UI after the license is removed but it is 100% accessible through the discovery portal for litigation and discovery purposes.
Rob Axelrod What you are referring to is the Inactive mailboxes functionality: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/create-and-manage-inactive-mailboxes?view=o365-worldwide
As the article clearly states, you need to *delete* the user object in order to make the mailbox inactive, removing the license is not a supported method and puts the mailbox in an erroneous state.
