Archiving Office 365 mail boxes?

[nicholab]

How do you archive Office 365 mailboxes when staff leave and can I get Salamander to do it? Edited July 24, 2019 by ZeroHour

[chaplic]

Assuming they have something like an E3 license, put them on legal hold THEN remove the license. I've no idea about salamander, but there's no inbuilt functionality in o365 to do this, so a bit of powershel is needed.

[nicholab]

If the mail box is on legal hold can I give another user permission to access the mailbox?

[chaplic]

Not with the use case I describe. However, you can convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox, which assuming it's less than 50GB removes the licensing requirement. I would not reccomend this going forward, you'll end up with lots of 'zombie' mailboxes

[CHiLL]

When our staff leave (when an end date for their employment is entered into SIMS), on that date Salamander automatically converts that mailbox into a shared mailbox and remove all assigned licenses.

[nicholab]

I just done a test I made a user changed mailbox to shared and then removed the user this has removed the shared mail box? How do I stop this or do you leave your user in place in AD?

[chaplic]

A mailbox is an attribute of the user, just like their second name or phone number, so if you delete the user account, you delete the second name, phone number and mailbox.

[CHiLL]

I just done a test I made a user changed mailbox to shared and then removed the user this has removed the shared mail box? How do I stop this or do you leave your user in place in AD?

I think our Salamander process is:

Detects end date in SIMS > Converts mailbox to shared > Removes O365 liceneses > Moves user account to another OU (still within the synced OU structure that Azure syncs) > Moves the Home folder to an archive folder > Disables the AD account.

 

There may be more steps, though I believe that they're the main ones.