Removing license from user, what gets removed and how quickly (returing staff member)

[Rob Clarke]

Hi,

Just after some clarification, hopefully from someone that has gone through the process. 

Example, a staff member leaves the company and their account has it's O365 license removed as part of the leaver process.  Then for some reason they come back to the company.  When a license applied back to their old account everything should be active again. My question is does any data get deleted at the license removal stage or is it preserved to 30 days? assuming the staff member came back within 30 days would they see any data loss (SPO, ODB, mail etc) or will it appear as it was.

Cheers

Rob

[#2]

From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/add-users/remove-former-employee?view=o365-worldwid...

6. Remove and delete the Office 365 license from a former employee

When you remove a license, you can assign it to someone else. Or, you can delete the license so you don't pay for it until you hire another person. When you remove or delete a license, the user's old email, contacts, and calendar are retained for 30 days, then permanently deleted. If you remove or delete a license but don't delete the account, the content in the user's OneDrive will remain accessible to you even after 30 days.

[#3]

This is interesting, so you think without a license assigned the mailbox will eventually become inactive. A customer of mine has unlicensed mailboxes still active after 40+ days.

[#4]

@robshin Yep. The 30-day period is a legal/licensing condition. The exact time when a mailbox becomes inactive depends on when it is processed. I've seen this take longer.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/securitycompliance/create-and-manage-inactive-mailboxes is also a good read.

[#5]

@Tony Redmond 

So how does litigation hold work in terms of the duration you set?

For instance, you disable CAS settings for a mailbox, remove the license, Litigation hold is enabled.

After 30 days it becomes inactive, let's say you set the litigation hold duration for 60 days.

Does the mailbox get removed from inactive mailbox section after 60days or does it just say inactive till the hold is disabled?

[#6]

@Anthony Leong If you remove litigation hold from an inactive mailbox and that hold is the only one applying to the mailbox, then the mailbox can be deleted by Exchange and will be removed by a background process.

[#7]

@Tony Redmond 

Are there any methods that allow you to remove the licenses and have the mailbox content available for recovery for a set time (let's say 5 months) and if not recovered its just auto-deleted?

[#8]

@Anthony Leong If a retention policy is in force to keep items for five months, it will lapse after that period and any inactive mailboxes will be removed (if no other holds apply to the mailboxes).

[#9]

@Anthony LeongI've just seen this thread and wanted to let you know about a way round losing a mailbox after losing licence.  Basically you convert the mailbox to a Shared Mailbox and this will then maintain the mailbox for as long as you have the underlying AD identity.  Similarly, if you have retention perdiods set for Exchange, the actual content of the mailbox will be retained (without the structure).  What some customers do is keep all disabled AD accounts for 6 months after which they are all deleted (some keep them forever), if the mailbox has been converted to Shared then this will stay around until the AD account is deleted (so 6 months).

I hope this makes sense.

[#10]

@Rob Clarke 

This is a flow chart describing the case in different scenarios,