Does Microsoft Office 365 Archive Old Users Mailboxes? Explore How

Overview- When an employee departs from organizations, administrators need to perform certain procedures. In the context of Office 365, it’s important to manage their Office 365 mailbox and to keep data safe, follow rules, and keep important messages. However, keeping the old employee’s emails without paying for their Office 365 subscription becomes a problem. So, here in this guide we will discuss the best Microsoft Office 365 email archiving solutions and how to perform them.

Do you know what is the most important assets of a business? Of course, it’s day-to-day data and customer relationships 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. Through this practice, admins remove Office 365 subscriptions from PC of their employees.  All the mailboxes of terminated employees occupy space and cost in the Office 365 application.

So, the Organization wants to delete those unused accounts and get the license back. However, the main problem is that there are some important data items residing in the mailbox of a dedicated terminated employee which are set up in Archive in Outlook 365.

So, without saving those data in a safe place, companies cannot delete the account. For that companies migrate archive mailbox to Office 365 and regain data access. 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?

It becomes a very important task for organizations to preserve the data of the employee plus not to hamper the daily tasks as well. Microsoft Office 365 Backup and Recovery Policy is one effective approach to utilizing the Office 365 Archive old users. This allows organizations to retain the emails of former employees for a specific period, as defined by the organization’s data retention policies.

This type of situation implies why is Office 365 backup necessary for organizations. Therefore, for our users, we frame a method. In the following section, users will get the various workarounds that can be used to archive terminated employee emails in Office 365. Go through every method and select as per your requirements.

# 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. These archived emails can be used at any time while leaving the 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 the 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 the In-Place Archive feature and use the data items from the inactive mailbox. In 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 a sufficient amount of time. Because it consists of a sequence of steps.

• • • The first step is to log into a Microsoft Office 365 account.
    • Once you open the O365 account successfully, go to the Exchange Admin Center or EAC.
    • Go to the left-side pane and click on compliance management. Now, choose the 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.

  

  • • The next step is to add the terminated employee account to the 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 the following options:
      • Hold indefinitely
      • Specify the number of days to hold items relative to their received data

      

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

  

  • • Finally, you can remove the user’s account from O365. Now, the mailbox is represented as ‘Inactive’ and you can re-assign the license to another new user.

  

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

# Approach 2. Enable Microsoft (Office) 365 Archive Mailbox Using Microsoft PowerShell

Step 1. Launch Windows PowerShell>>Launch the Start menu and enter “Powershell” into the search bar, then choose the Windows PowerShell program to execute.

Step 2. Connect to Exchange Online. In PowerShell, enter the command and press Enter.

Connect-ExchangeOnline

The online module will start, and a sign-in window will open.

Step 3. Now, enter your username (email) and password to sign in.

Step 4. Once connected to your Office 365 account, you will see a new command line prompt.

Step 5. Afterthat, enable archiving for a single user. To allow saving for a particular user, enter the command below, substituting <user_display_name> with the user’s display name:

Enable-Mailbox -Identity <user_display_name> -Archive

Step 6. Now enable archiving for all users. To enable archiving for all users, run this command

Get-Mailbox -Filter {ArchiveGuid -Eq "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" -AND RecipientTypeDetails -Eq "UserMailbox"} | Enable-Mailbox -Archive

Step 7. To disable the archive mailboxes for all users, execute the command:

Get-Mailbox -Filter {ArchiveGuid -Ne "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" -AND RecipientTypeDetails -Eq "UserMailbox"} | Disable-Mailbox -Archive

Step 8. To disable archiving for a specific user, type the following command, replacing <user_display_name> with the user’s display name:

Disable-Mailbox -Identity <user_display_name> -Archive

Step 9. To disable the archiving feature for all users, execute the following command:

Get-Mailbox -Filter {ArchiveGuid -Ne "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" -AND RecipientTypeDetails -Eq "UserMailbox"} | Disable-Mailbox -Archive

Takeout User Mailbox in PST for Archiving

Several organizations need to maintain the terminated employee data for a long period. Because it contains some useful data that will be used by the company in the future. However, with the help of these methods, Microsoft Office 365 archive old users email only.

That is, one can only save emails from the cloud platform. And, the rest of the data gets deleted from 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, calendars and documents of terminated employee, then it is better to download Office 365 emails 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, documents 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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