Forum Discussion
O365 email archive migration
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.
Yes, sorry for not being more explicit. My assumption was that they would not just remove the licenses but remove the user accounts too since the OP said that these people aren't with the organization anymore.
Rob Axelrod @Vasil Michev Our plan is to create the needed accounts, migrate the emails, then remove the accounts. If my understanding of how the O365 eDiscovery functionality works is correct, we would then be able to search those old emails for any pertinent emails when a search request comes in.
