Does Microsoft Office 365 Archive Old Users Mailboxes? Explore How

Do you know what is the most important assets of a business? Of course, its day-to-day data and customer relationship in their respective domain. However, Organizations that are using Office 365 face some challenges in managing the cost of their data. And, the reasons are terminated employees or employees who resign from his/her job. Actually, all the mailboxes of terminated employees occupy space and cost in Office 365 application.

So, Organization wants to delete those unused accounts and get the license back. However, the main problem is that there are some important data items resides in the mailbox of a dedicated terminated employee. So, without saving those data in a safe place, companies cannot delete the account. Approximately, 120 million business active users work with Office 365. Now, you can think how big the problem is.

That is why we have come up with this article where users will find different approaches by which Microsoft Office 365 archive old users mailboxes. So, let’s get started!

What to do with Office 365 terminated employees mailboxes?

In the following section, users will get the various workarounds that can be used to archive terminated employee emails in Office 365. Go through each and every method and select as per your requirement.

# Approach 1: Archive Employee Email Via. Office 365 Enterprise Plan

This feature simply permits the admin to archive old emails on Office 365 cloud platform. This archived emails can be used any time while leaving O365 license for another employee. Now, let’s see how it is to be done in the Office 365 suite.

Before You Begin, Fulfil the Prerequisites

Before starting the process, first, you need to take Exchange Online Archiving subscription plan. It can be used to do in-place archiving, solve eDiscovery challenges, and much more. It permits Office 365 administrators, record managers, or compliance officers to perform In-Place Archive feature and use the data items from the inactive mailbox. By this way Microsoft Office 365 archive old users mailboxes manually.

Steps to Archive Terminated Employee Email in Office 365

Before using this method, make sure that you have sufficient amount of time. Because it consists a sequence of steps.

• • • The first step is login into Microsoft Office 365 account.
    • Once you opened O365 account successfully, go to Exchange Admin Center or EAC.
    • Go to the left-side pane and click on compliance management. Now, choose in-place eDiscovery & hold option from the action pane.

  

  • • After that, you need to make a new In-Place Hold Policy and provide a suitable name such as Archive Terminate Employee.

  

  • • Next step is to add the terminated employee account in recently created policy as shown in the screenshot.

  

  • • Now, choose the Include all user mailbox content option to archive all data items.

  

  • • Select the box under In-Place Hold settings. Also, select the radio button of following options:
      • Hold indefinitely
      • Specify the number of days to hold items relative to their received data

      

    • Go to Recipients option, all the users that on-hold are listed here.

  

  • • Finally, you can remove the users account from O365. Now, the mailbox represented as ‘Inactive’ and you can re-assigned licensed to other new user.

  

  • In order to see the name of all inactive Mailboxes in Office 365, users can use the below-mentioned PowerShell cmdlet.

Get –Mailbox -InactiveMailboxOnly

• • You need to use In-Place eDiscovery search to view the content of the mailbox.

# Approach 2: Takeout User Mailbox in PST for Archiving

There is a number of organizations that need to maintain the terminated employee data for a long period of time. Because it contains some useful data that will be used by the company in the future. However, with the help of this method, Microsoft Office 365 archive old users emails only. That is, one can only save emails from the cloud platform. And, rest of the data gets deleted with the account. Moreover, it is only available in the Enterprise version of Office 365.

In such a situation, when an organization needs archive old mailbox data along with contacts, calendar, journals, tasks of terminated employee, then it is better to migrate the mailbox in .pst file and store it on the local system. It can be easily done by Office 365 Backup & Restore Software. It is a powerful tool that can save emails, contacts, calendar, task, journals in the .pst format on the local hard-drive. If you want to maintain folder hierarchy, then it can be easily achieved by the application.

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In a case, when you again need to restore this Office 365 archived old users mailboxes and other data, then use Restore option provided by the software. And, again access the data in O365.

Bringing It All Together

In a business, every month employees join and resign the organization. However, if the company using O365 plan, then it is administrator responsibility to delete those users account who is no longer member of the organization. And, keep the important information on a safe location that resides in terminated employees mailboxes before deleting the account. The Microsoft Office 365 archive old users emails using In-Place archive method or you can also use smart Office 365 Mailbox backup software to fix the issues. With the help of the tool, one can save the emails, contacts, tasks, and much more in Personal folder file format on the local drive within few mouse clicks.