M365 Disable Outlook Feature

[talksr]

Hello.

Does anyone know if it is possible to entirely disable Outlook on an M365 tenancy.

The school is using LGfL and is happy with this however they find staff often don't get emails because when staff are signed into the M365 tenancy, they "Share" files or folders but the share emails never get through as they are going through the Outlook on M365 which isn't used.

 

I did get some costings from LGfL to migrate everything over to the M365 tenancy, but the school was not happy to pay for this so has remained with emails on LGfLMail and everything else on Microsoft.

[Boredguy]

You can choose to not provide your users with an Exchange licence within the Apps which will prevent Outlook from working as they will get a message saying they don't have an e-mail account.

 

Personally I'd prefer to migrate e-mails over to 365 as you then have full control over the mail server settings etc. I'd look to at least move staff mail accounts over, and just have students recreated empty (saves on cost)

[DavR]

+1 for the licensing route.

 

I've got a couple of accounts, like supply teachers or third party staff, that I do different group based licensing for to remove email rights. Still provide an O365 license, but not including the Exchange Online licensing application under the details.

[talksr]

Thank you both, that’s really helpful. I couldn’t see anything in the settings so I was assuming it might not be possible. Can you help me pinpoint exactly where I can find this? If I head to M365 Admin>Licences> I get the usual A3, M365 Apps for Faculty/Students, but not seeing anything that mentions exchange.

 

 

I totally agree re doing just staff, but last time I put this to SLT, I was told that there was no money. I have had a huge amount of resistance to switching to the cloud as it is. Nobody wants change and they go out of their way to slate M365/OneDrive and say it never works. It has been a nightmare to be honest and I can’t believe how anti-cloud everyone has been.

[DavR]

The modular options for the licensing are available where you apply the license - either to the user, or to the group.

 

If you assign your licenses per user, it's M365 Admin | Users | Active Users | (pick your user) | Licenses and apps on the pop out tabs.

 

If you assign your licenses per group, it's in Entra ID Admin | Groups | (pick your group) | Manage | Licenses, and select apps per product.

[talksr]

The modular options for the licensing are available where you apply the license - either to the user, or to the group.

 

If you assign your licenses per user, it's M365 Admin | Users | Active Users | (pick your user) | Licenses and apps on the pop out tabs.

 

If you assign your licenses per group, it's in Entra ID Admin | Groups | (pick your group) | Manage | Licenses, and select apps per product.

 

Aha thank you. I have found it. Going to have a play tomorrow and test it out on a couple of sample users first. Thanks again, really helpful. I will ask LGfL for a new quote on migrating just staff and will re-submit to SLT, you never know, they may decide they have some cash

[DavR]

And yeah, bad luck on the resistance to going full O365 with the email.

 

We went from Staffmail to native Office 365 Exchange a couple of years back, I think they charged us between £400-600 to migrate all our mailboxes over the holidays, and tbh, once we'd got everyone's phones onto to the new system, we've not looked back. The only advantage of the LGfL system was better email filtering.

[Oaktech]

I'd seriously consider migrating your mail...

 

However, you have several options with what you have now. You can choose to unlicense them for exchange, or you can also choose to leave them licensed, but have transport rules to dump and notify.

 

We have transport rules for students and other generic accounts that shouldn't be sending mail.