New Employee Email Setup Best Practices?

[Bill Ferguson]

What is the best way to set up an email for a new person?

When a staff member quits, and a new person is hired?

I want the new person to be able to read old email of the former staff,
I want the new person to receive all new emails sent to the former person (maybe for one year only) since the new person is doing the same job.
We want the new person to have their own email address, of course.

I have been creating a new email address for the new person.
Then adding the former staff's email account as a additional mailbox.

That works, in that the new person can read the former staff person's email.

And the 2 accounts are kept separate, so it's clear where the email was sent.

The negative is that I'm now using 2 email accounts for one person, for 6 months or a year. Since we're paying for each account.

We're using Outlook 2010 locally and Office 365 for the mail server.

What would be a better way to set up a new email account, so the new person can read and receive the former staff's email, and not use 2 email accounts?

thank you,

Bill 

[#2]

We assign an Exchange license for a new hire.

When a staff person leaves we put an In Place Hold on their mailbox to preserve it for eDiscovery. We put an out of office message that they are no longer with the company and to contact another staff person. After 30 days we remove the license. 

If we want someone to access the former employee's mailbox then we give them Full Access for 30 days. This allows them to move any email out and respond to any e-mails that arrive in that 30 day window. We definitely don't want an ex-employees e-mail address to stay around longer and it is under very rare circumstances that we allow a mailbox to stay around longer than 30 days.

[#3]

Hi Bill,

You can convert to Shared Mailbox and give the requirement permissions to the new person.

For compliance reasons is the best approach, because if you want to preserve you can assign a licence and after that place the mailbox in hold.

Is the best fit for regulation that normaly is written in companies and without problems in future.

[#4]

A Shared Mailbox is an option, but you'll have to decide if you want all those Shared Mailboxes laying around. 

For us, if all our ex-employees were Shared Mailboxes we'd have over 500! I sure don't want to manage that number.

Having a clear time frame when a former mailbox (shared or otherwise) goes away would be advisable.

[#5]

Normally we do 30 days of access as an additional mailbox. We have given longer but that is the standard. That gives plenty of time to get any necessary emails and respond, like was mentioned. Rarely does the access even last that long, as most users request it to be removed before then.

Obviously there will be some that push against this, but those are few.

[#6]

We have been using some title O365 accounts (username and primary SMTP/reply to address with the person's real name as the display name).  Treasurer@ Communications@ etc. originally we did this because we have certain positions that transit to new people in 6 years or less and this made for ease of transition.  Now this practice has expanded to other positions.  ITdirector@ and more.  I am worried about things like Yammer posts and Yammer private messages and MORE (OneDrive files, Sway, Stream) for accounts that are one individual and then emails and posts are coming from another individual.  Does anyone have any additional thoughts or best practices based on this scenario?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[#7]

Export former employee mailbox as PST file. Give access to new employee to this file, also create an email alias, so the emails sent to former collegue will go to newly hired person. You will have only one account, but then emails won't be kep separate. 

[#8]

There is so much more now with O365.  We thought that using title accounts and passing them to the newest person with that title saved a lot of IT work not just shifting email.  OneDrive files, SharePoint permissions and others files that had been shared with this title account would all remain for the next user of the account.  All the rights and membershopts to Yammer groups, O365 outlook groups and DLs would be maintained.  BUT is this a bad practice due to things like Yammer private messaging to have an account be a generic title account and pass it on?