How to Off-Board with Ease
Office 365 employee off-boarding procedures vary for business continuity and legal compliance, but a common requirement for all companies is preserving employee emails. There are four ways to accomplish this:
Leave the user account licensed and active (is this cost effective?)
Convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox (what about security and tracking?)
Use litigation hold or retention policies to place the mailbox in “inactive” status (is this cost effective?)
Archive the contents to a PST file in Voleer (both, cost effective and secure)
Leave the Account Licensed & Active
If money is no object, the simplest option is to reset the password of a user and give the password to whomever will be the designated custodian. As more employees are off-boarded, managing, securing, and keeping tabs on all the “zombie” accounts becomes costly and a logistical nightmare.
Convert to a Shared Mailbox
If the mailbox is less than 50 GB in size, it is possible to convert the mailbox to a Shared Mailbox without the need for a license. Mailboxes greater than 50 GB require a license even if converted to a shared mailbox and these large mailboxes are becoming more common. Unfortunately, shared mailboxes are not a secure solution as the contents can be altered by anyone with access to the shared mailbox. Additionally, using shared mailboxes to archive user mailbox data is not authorized by Microsoft and is a grey area that most businesses should avoid.
Place the Mailbox in Inactive Status
If the mailbox has an Exchange Online Plan 2 license, it can be placed on litigation hold or have a retention policy applied. Enabling a litigation hold or applying a new retention policy is not instantaneous and can take time to become active. Once completed, if the user account is deleted, the mailbox will be retained and exported using Microsoft’s e Discovery functionality.
Use Voleer to Archive the Mailbox Contents
PST files can be easily archived, allowing your company to retain the user’s mailbox as it was when the user was off-boarded. A copy of the PST can also be provided to the user’s replacement or data custodian and easily added to Outlook. While other companies charge per-user licenses for this functionality, Voleer offers a simple automation template that will securely archive any user’s mailbox to a PST file.
Our free plan offers enough complimentary usage credits to archive a small volume of mailboxes each month for small and mid-size customers the usage included with a single subscription make it significantly more cost effective than its per-user licensed peers.
Try It Out
Simply log into Voleer, launch the Archive Mailbox to PST template, enter credentials that have the proper access to the mailbox and the email address of the account you want to archive, and run the template. When it is completed, the PST file can be downloaded in the Files tab of the Voleer Workspace it was run in.
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