Office 365 - End of School Year Procedures

[mattpant]

Hi All,

 

This will be our first school year using Office 365 - does anybody have any end of school year guides or procedures that they perform on there Office 365 setup that they wouldn't mind sharing with us?

 

Best Practice etc etc for leavers - do you have to remove the licenses from leavers, or once deleted will this free the license up again, or if you don't will you loose it?

 

We are using DirSync with Password - which setups the users nicely in Office 365 - does anybody have any scripts that would fully automate this for us, by adding the relevant licenses to new users - set location as UK, and give the students an OWA Mailbox Policy?

 

Many Thanks

 

Matt

[FN-GM]

What did you do with email before 365? Surely you just do the same thing with leavers on this platform?

[mattpant]

We used SquirrelMail previously, where we just deleted the users from the system, each year group had it's own group, so we promoted Y13 to "Leavers", Y12 - 13, Y11 - 12 etc etc Office 365 doesn't have this OU type structure, all the users just appear under users! - there were no licenses to issue/remove, no links to Active Directory, no Powershell commands to run.

 

Thanks

 

Matt

[Boredguy]

I removed our leavers from AD at the start of August, and DirSync then tidies up 365 by deleting the accounts and reading the licenses back into the pool for reallocating out to the next batch.

 

All e-mails are automatically deleted, but they are recoverable for up to 30 days via the web console.

 

If you search this forum, you will get a few scripts that will do the license allocation, as I've posted ours a few times already. Use the keyword "AddLicenses" and you should find the posts.

[synaesthesia]

Does anyone else keep email accounts open for leavers, out of interest? Beforehand we just left the users on Zimbra, and now with O365 linked to AD that's not something we'd like to do. Can easily remove them from the domain users group etc in AD and put them in another OU to keep them open but wondering how other schools handle this.

[FN-GM]

31st August the licences get removed. Then we delete the accounts in December. We archive the home areas but not email.

[aceonbass]

We only sync a specific OU from our domain so DirSync deletes the account once our on-site maintenance scripts move the Alumni out of that OU. We automatically expire a users account 45 days after their course ends, and move them a further 15 days later. This gives us a suitable window in case the students decide to re-enrol and don't do so in the normal timeframe.