O365 Leavers/Alumni

[CAWJames]

Morning all,

 

We already have a 'faculty' O365 account, and now that MS are offering ProPlus to all, we want to get our students into the system.

 

We are strange in that all our students are held in an SQL database and not in AD, but this we are living with, and will either powershell straight from our DB to O365 or add a "middleware" fake AD syncing with SQL(which would be overkill for just O365, but gives us more auth options for other systems in the long run).

 

So the question has arisen, and I can't quite seem to find an answer, what happens when a student leaves?

 

Do we have to prune? or from a marketing view can they keep the address perpetually as an alumni account(oh, think of the mail shots!!)?

 

How do MS view a person who is no longer in education with us, but we allow them to keep the address? We also do continuing CPD over a former student working life, so people tend to stay on our DB for a loooonnnnngggg time.

 

I assume we could prune using powershell, as easily as making addresses? Simple table/view with additions/deletions in I suppose, love SSIS!

 

Thanks

 

James

[JRowley]

Depends really on what you want to do, Microsoft offer a basic license for Alumni for free - "Exchange Online (Plan 1) for Alumni", you would basically remove all other licenses from a leaver and give them this. It would give them access to emails, contacts, calendar, you know the basic stuff but no OneDrive/Sharepoint. You can have as many as you want I believe (someone please correct me if this is incorrect).

 

So if you want to keep your Alumni in touch this would be your best bet.

[Boredguy]

With DirSync, once the account is disabled/deleted in Active Directory, the associated 365 account becomes a cloud only one for the next 30 days and the license is removed.

 

You can get Alumni licenses which just gives them e-mail access for the princely sum of £0, so you can go down that route if you wanted.

[CAWJames]

Thanks for that, any idea where the Alumni options are, or do we have to have them added to our account? And I assume that we can assign them, the same as we would using Powershell?

 

My head hurts just thinking about all this, and the more zero touch we make it the better!

 

James

[JRowley]

If you go here on an O365 admin account - https://portal.office.com/Commerce/Catalog.aspx

 

You can 'purchase' the Alumni licenses for your tenant, I don't know what/if there is a limit on the number you can buy in one go, but you could buy 1000 to begin with. Then once you have leavers you can add the license to the user using PowerShell, and presumably remove the old licenses as well. I don't know the license name for PowerShell as I haven't looked at the Alumni one myself but it should be fairly straight forward.

 

Definitely agree on the zero touch approach!

[CAWJames]

All sounds good so far

Thanks again

 

James