Office 365

[itgeek]

Hi We are currently signed up to the office 365 plan A2 for students and staff. I need to be able to keep all emails for 5 years. I think to enable this you need to be signed up to the A3 plan.

Is this correct and how is other school doing this? Its going to cost a lot of money

 

Thanks

 

 

Students:

£1.90 user/ month

 

Faculty and staff:

£3.40 user/ month

[plexer]

If you need archiving and compliance you'll have to pay for it.

 

Ben

[itgeek]

Thanks for your reply. So for 1200 students and 200 Staff it would be cheaper putting in an exchange server then?

 

Thanks for your help.

[Edu-IT]

You can journal off to a separate email address, then export that to a PST, and backup.

[plexer]

Thanks for your reply. So for 1200 students and 200 Staff it would be cheaper putting in an exchange server then?

 

Thanks for your help.

 

Does sticking an exchange server in solve your archiving and compliance issues though?

 

Ben

[john]

Do you need to keep student mail for 5 years? Staff I could maybe understand but student is unusual I would say.

 

An in-house Exchange server will be significantly cheaper with those numbers for the users needs, cheap NAS for the Archive box using the achiving and retention policy in exchange job done.

[jmak]

Further to @ john's post, I think you can have a mix of subscription levels, ie upgrade just the staff accounts if they're the only ones who need 5 year archiving.

[sukh]

At the moment you cant mix service subscriptions just yet. If you go to A3 then you can just put them in hold, no need to archive.

[jamesbmarshall]

Hi We are currently signed up to the office 365 plan A2 for students and staff. I need to be able to keep all emails for 5 years. I think to enable this you need to be signed up to the A3 plan.

 

The A3 plan offers a lot more than just the unlimited mailbox and archiving features. It also includes the Office ProPlus subscription and other little enhancements. If you're specifically looking for longer rolling legal hold then you could look at just purchasing the Exchange Online Plan 2 component and giving that to the users that require it.

 

You can journal off to a separate email address, then export that to a PST, and backup.

 

This is also another option; if you've got on-premises or other hosted storage then you can do this without Exchange Online Plan 2 or A3.

 

Further to @ john's post, I think you can have a mix of subscription levels, ie upgrade just the staff accounts if they're the only ones who need 5 year archiving.

 

Exactly this. You can have (for example) your students on A2, your "regular" teaching staff on A2, and your admin staff, SLT, etc. on A2 + Exchange Online Plan 2 or A3. Basically you can assign licences to whichever users need the functionality. I'd say that it would be a pretty unusual requirement to need to keep student mail for 5 years; perhaps the 30-day single item recovery is enough for them?

[Trapper]

If you have staff time you could always connect to Outlook and save in a PST. Depends on the number of mailboxes though.

[sukh]

not really ket on pst files they can get corrupted. So at a min, back them up. I would still would go for a journaling or archive solution.

[xenonive]

You could be cheeky and use gmail for archiving , we are looking to sync AD to both office 365 and Google services , users use office 365 and we run mailbox sync from office 365 to gmail accounts. As long as you don't set Gmail to delete users when removed from active directory you should be able to keep your archive on Gmail. To stop users signing in to email accounts just remove permission and allow only sync admin account access.

[jamesbmarshall]

Don't forget that, under A2, you get 50GB inbox and 50GB archive for free. You just need to turn the archive on, and set some policies.

 

It depends on your requirements. If you just want to offer a "best effort" archive for emails for a period of time then you could just use the free archive features, turn single item recovery to the full 30 days free. After 30 days this would not stop mail being permanently deleted, but at least you'd have a process for automatically keeping stuff.

 

If, however, your requirements are that you must keep mail for a mandated amount of time (let's say 7 years) to comply with FOI requests or whatever might come your way, then you could invest in Exchange Online Plan 2, as I mentioned previously. This allows you to extend your single-item recovery beyond 30 days, and also allows you to put mailboxes on litigation hold.

 

I would definitely not recommend PST files. That is a world of problems waiting to happen. If you just want somewhere to shove mail that's safe and anywhere-that's-not-my-inbox then I'd give the online archive a go and see how you get on.

[chazzy2501]

You can have your own exchange server with 1 client cal and use that for journaling from O365.

[CyBeRkId2002]

sorry to drag up an old thread but we are looking into a similar area...

 

Does having an EES agreement give you access to any of the litigation hold/extended recovery features or are the exchange online plans entirely different?

[jamesbmarshall]

Does having an EES agreement give you access to any of the litigation hold/extended recovery features or are the exchange online plans entirely different?

 

Office 365 plans are separate (although they can be added to an EES agreement). If you want archiving and litigation hold, etc. in Exchange Online then you'll need an Exchange Online licence (i.e. Exchange Online Plan 2, Plan A3, Plan A4, etc.).

[CyBeRkId2002]

Cheers for the reply James... much appreciated!