Forum Discussion
O365 email archive migration
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.
jameslee-atg This is not a minor undertaking. Account creation and management of it is one aspect of this challenge but there are several more.
From the sounds of it you are seeking to perform a full journal transformation. This entails examining all the messages within your organization for the sender and recipient information associated with them, determining which addresses belong to which people, then sending those specific messages to a recoverable items directory for active users, and to newly created mailboxes (to be made inactive) for people who have left your organization.
Standard email archive migrations are not easy, although the industry has progressed to the point that they feel easy. Transforming a journal archive into a native in place model is a large undertaking.
My organization is the market leader in email archive migrations and I am the product owner for our archive migration solutions. You did not mention what source your data is archived in, but if it is EV, we perform EV journal to o365 journal transformations within our product suite. There are other options available to you too, although it does make a lot of sense to prevent locking yourself into your current model after moving to o365 due to the costs available to you and your e5 permitting advanced eDisco already built in. I am a big advocate of bringing your data home during such a migration to prevent locking into the legacy journaled data format for compliance or eDiscovery.
If you would like to know more, feel free to https://www.quadrotech-it.com/contact/! I am always happy to help answer some of your questions too if that is more to your likeing.
