Transition Student license to Exchange Online for Alumni licenses

[JacobKane]

Hello,

We have been asked to keep email active for our graduated seniors. We are in the process of getting a quantity of Exchange Online for Alumni licenses for this purpose. 

Our user accounts are on-prem and we use Azure AD Sync to synchronize them Office 365. Our user mailboxes are all in Office 365.

Changing the license from Student to Alumni seems fairly straight forward. We would also like convert these accounts from on-prem AD sync accounts to cloud only. We need to free up our AD user Cals as these students leave. I have not found good guidance on the best way to move students to Exchange Online for Alumni licenses, have them keep all their existing email, and change them from AD Sync'd accounts to cloud only.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Thanks,

~jake

[#2]

I'd recommend using the inactive mailboxes functionality: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/inactive-mailboxes-in-office-365?view=o365...

[#3]

@JacobKane thanks for the Q. You may have already found the answers to your question but just in case, we did a post on this exact topic. 

[#4]

@JacobKane 

With respect, the Inactive mailbox procedure seems a bit roundabout; and the blog post is only about re-assigning licenses and doesn't address the other main question, which is how to delete the accounts in AD and transition to cloud-only whilst retaining identity and mailbox contents.

I wonder if there is a more elegant solution than Litigative holding etc...