Returning students and their Onedrive accounts

[petben]

Hello, does anyone have this behaviour.

 

 

1. A student is attending school and has a 365/OneDrive account

2. The student leaves to go abroad/another school, the account gets deleted as usual.

3. The student returns and gets readmitted

4. The account gets recreated but OneDrive is inaccessible as it seems they connect to their old account or the old user account of the same name is connected to their new account.

 

 

A Microsoft backend issue but they don't seem to really have a plan or a fix...

 

Thoughts?

[mavhc]

Don't delete accounts until they've left secondary education, just disable them?

[3s-gtech]

^This. Our leavers accounts stay inactive and disabled, when they (often) come back Salamander just reactivates them.

[petben]

I like the idea but...do you have loads of student 365 licenses, or doesn't it really get affected that much? There is probably also a Q mark over data retention rules, if a student leaves in Y7 would you keep their 365 data until they would have been in Y13?

[psydii]

We move leavers to the A1 licence of which we have thousands. We also disable them and set a random password. Azure ATP/Defender for Identity keeps an eye on the inactive accounts for suspicious activity.

A few years after they have gone, we clear them out. We use Salamander to most of this and dump them into leaver_year groups so we can clean them up later. Salamander also handles re-onboarding the accounts if/when they come back.

 

Same for teachers. We always have a couple of returning staff each year, on top of the NQTs who did their training with us six months ago.

[pete]

Or, rather than recreating the account, pull them out of the AD recycle bin.

 

Get-ADObject -Filter {displayName -eq "Joe Bloggs"} -IncludeDeletedObjects | Restore-ADObject

 

365 will just relink the account.

[3s-gtech]

Yeah, thousands of licenses. I could script the licenses being revoked but haven't needed to yet - if you do that there is a risk that any online services like OnDrive will be emptied/deleted.

[mavhc]

Does mean that over time you really want a number in the account name/email address for the year, otherwise in 10 years time you'll be on jbloggs43

[psydii]

After 9 years and nearly 5000 students, the highest we've got to is "2" but we use a few more letters from the first name.