Office 365: Archiving leaver mailboxes to PST in bulk?

[sonofsanta]

I think I know the answer here, but I can't be the only one who has come up against this.

 

I want to close off all the old Year 13 accounts (bit overdue, tbh). We always disable accounts because it costs us nothing to keep them on hand. Files have been taken off the file server onto BluRay, and now I need to reclaim their Office 365 licences.

 

Before I do that, and their mailboxes get deleted, I'd like to grab the PST to archive them, just in case. Storage is cheap and I'd rather have the data than not.

 

Is there any way in Office 365 of doing this in bulk, or do I really have to add each mailbox to my Outlook and PST them one by one? New-MailboxExportRequest looks to be Exchange 2013 only, and whilst MessageOps can apparently do it it costs $1500pa for 1001-5000 mailboxes, and their free offer ("set us as your partner") doesn't apply to free education plans.

 

So

(a) does anyone else know how to do this without spending silly money? If I have to spend a few quid I'll live with it, but the pricing above is madness.

(b) does anyone else even bother? Am I just being paranoid/overprepared?

[Michael]

Just a thought, if you're a school, why not add one additional year group worth of licenses (say 90 for 3 classes) if you're on E1 licensing, as that basically gives you 12 months to hold onto the data, then delete it when another year is about to leave.

[sonofsanta]

Done that already - this is the Year 13 group that left last July, so we're already running a full 7 year groups plus this lot of leavers - but I would like it on hand for a longer period just in case a police investigation etc. needs access.

 

Given how easy it is to request/assign O365 licences, I suppose I could just strip them of the Student Advantage licence, disable the accounts in AD and leave it at that; not as elegant, perhaps, but certainly workable. Not a bad idea. Cheers!

[Michael]

As you say allocating licenses/disabling accounts is easier, rather than moving the data - plus by logic, accounts can still receive e-mail even if they're disabled, if ever it were of interest to an on-going Police investigation.

[Cache]

This has been on my list to look at but never got round to it.

 

An experiment today suggests that it is possible, if you use ediscovery, select all the mailboxes you want to archive and run the search, once the search has completed you can use the export to pst option and then download a pst for each mailbox.

 

I did test this in 2 minutes, with 2 mailboxes that were empty (my 2 test accounts) so it might work it might not. Hopefully in Feb half term I might get round to looking at it properly.

 

Since the summer, I just left the A2 licence allocated and removed all the student advantage licences to allocate to the new intake. It's somethign that I really need to sit and sort soon though so if you do sort anything I'd be interested to know what path you take.

[apearce]

Not quite PST but you can export to folder

http://www.messageops.com/software/messageops-microsoft-online-powershell-extensions/

[sonofsanta]

An experiment today suggests that it is possible, if you use ediscovery, select all the mailboxes you want to archive and run the search, once the search has completed you can use the export to pst option and then download a pst for each mailbox.

 

I did test this in 2 minutes, with 2 mailboxes that were empty (my 2 test accounts) so it might work it might not. Hopefully in Feb half term I might get round to looking at it properly.

 

I did try this but got nowhere, and presumed it was because we were only on the free plan, and didn't have the premium features required (as the admin site kept warning). But it sounds like you've managed it, so I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong here...

 

I'm in Exchange > Compliance > in-place eDiscovery & hold, and I can add a search, then choose All Users or Specific Users (though annoyingly I can't just search *07 to get all the appropriate accounts), but I can't set any search parameters (all greyed out) and I can't place mailboxes on hold (explicitly tells me I'm not licensed), and all I can do once the search is set up is Edit it. I can't run it or export to PST.

 

How did you manage it?

[Cache]

Not run it in anger, but I got the details from a friend in my old school who needed it to recover emails that went missing from someone's mailbox.

 

In Exchange, go to Permissions > Admin Roles and create a new role (we called our School Ediscovery) and assign the following roles to it:

 

• Legal Hold
  
• Mailbox Import Export
  
• Mailbox Search
  
• MailboxSearchApplication
  

 

and then assign it to your Admin account. I think you need to sign out and sign in again (might take up to 30 mins to update properly if I remember rightly).

 

Then if you go to Compliance Management > in-place edsicovery and hold, create a new search, fill in the name/description, select the mailboxes (can only see doing this one by one, I've never got the filter to work on anything in brackets), leave it on include all content, ignore in-place hold (as we don't have that licenced either) and click finish.

 

Wait for the search estimate to complete and then to the left of the refresh button is the Export to PST button which lets you download the search results and in the quick test I run made a new PST file for each mailbox.

 

If you manage to do it I'd be interested in the results

Edited February 7, 2015 by Cache

[xenonive]

Hopefully now that Google Vault is free to all educational sites Microsoft will consider giving educational sites access to eDiscovery and hold on accounts for free .

[Cache]

(can only see doing this one by one, I've never got the filter to work on anything in brackets)/QUOTE]

 

Should probably clarify that to say you can select multiple mailboxes in the single search, but can't search for *07 like you say.

 

Hopefully somethign simpler becomes available, while this should hopefully do the job it's still a bit of a pain.

[sonofsanta]

[a solution]

 

Winner

 

Set up a role as described and added my account; added a couple of test users from the list, clicked the download button (have to be in IE for this to work), pointed the tool at a local folder and it downloaded separate PSTs for each user.

 

Just need to write a quick PowerShell to add all the users to the search, which I can do based on the info in the top answer here: eDiscovery Powershell - Modify sourcemailbox list | Email and calendar | Microsoft Office 365 Community

 

Job done! Cheers folks

[sonofsanta]

Right, for future reference, the process for adding a whole OU to a search. You need to set the Search up in the first place in the GUI, so long as it has a name for the script to reference then you're good to go.

On a Domain Controller

 

• Open Active Directory Module for PowerShell from the Start Menu and run
  

cd Documents
Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase "OU=2007,OU=Students,OU=Users,DC=domain,DC=local" | FT SamAccountName > 2007.csv

with the OU path & CSV file amended as relevant.

 

• Open the generated CSV, select all and copy & paste into Excel.
  
• In the second column, use =TRIM() to strip out all the stupid padding PowerShell has put in.
  
• Copy and paste values from column B to column C to get a plain text version of the trimmed content.
  
• Copy and paste this into Notepad++ (minus the column headings), make sure Word Wrap is off, then Start recording a macro: hit End - Delete - , (comma), stop recording, then replay the macro until the end of the file to turn the list of values into a single, comma delimited line. Copy this to your clipboard.
  

On a server with the Azure AD extensions for PowerShell installed (i.e. where you normally run Exchange scripts)

 

• Open PowerShell and connect to Exchange, logging in with O365 credentials:

  Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
  $LiveCred = Get-Credential
  $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
  Import-PSSession $Session

  
  

• Run the following command with the list of usernames you have on your clipboard, replacing the name of the mailbox search with the name you specified in the GUI earlier:
  

Set-MailboxSearch "Search Name" -SourceMailboxes jbloggs07,jsmith07,...

You can check that all the names have been added to the list with

(get-MailboxSearch -Identity "Search Name").SourceMailboxes

Amending the "Search Name" as necessary, of course.

 

 

You can then export to PST from the GUI (using IE) as normal.

[Cache]

Will plan to try and do mine in Feb half term then, pleased it works and thanks for the hints about the powershell filter!

[Edu-IT]

Does it pull down just the mailbox, or, contacts and calendars too @sonofsanta?

[sonofsanta]

Does it pull down just the mailbox, or, contacts and calendars too @sonofsanta?

 

Can't remember off the top of my head, tbh--I've been lazy of late and just kept adding licences!