Student accounts in O365

[Bugzi]

Hello,

 

I wanted to ask how others manage the life cycle of student accounts within AD/O365/Entra please?

 

For example, when do you archive the student accounts, how do you archive them and what do you do with their OneDrive and Email in O365 please.

 

We are currently in the process of changing our backup solutions and most companies we have in contact with always want to backup all of our Entra accounts, which is a huge list which then affects the cost of the backup solution. So I'm trying to find out how other places tackle this please.

 

Many thanks

[Rob_D]

For us:

Student accounts are locked on their leaving date (if mid year). At the end of the academic year, the leaving cohort + all other leaver accounts are moved to archive and switched to A1 licenses.

The following year all archived accounts are deleted.

 

We use Barracuda backup which gives us the students free as long all our staff are licensed. (unless this has changed since our last renewal)

[itskdog]

We provision both staff and student accounts using RM Unify.

 

Unify disables and unlicences the account in M365 when they leave (an admin can extend this for 60 days to give the office time to correct the MIS if they haven't actually left, e.g. a fixed term contract was renewed but hadn't been updated yet). If an account has been marked as off-roll for 9 months, then the account is then deleted from M365.

 

We use Redstor to back up our M365 tenant, so data can be restored if needed beyond Microsoft's 30 day retention of unlicenced accounts.

[Bugzi]

Thanks for sharing that info.

 

We have Barracuda too, but it's not been that great so management is moving to another provider.

 

Do you still have access to A1 licenses?

We were told to that Microsoft is taking them away, so we've stayed away from using the A1 licenses.

[itskdog]

They're taking away A1 Plus (that attached OVS-ES Office entitlements to your M365 tenant), but A1 (the free cloud-apps-only licences) are staying, AFAIK.

[Olliedawg]

2 minutes ago, Bugzi said:

Thanks for sharing that info.

 

We have Barracuda too, but it's not been that great so management is moving to another provider.

 

Do you still have access to A1 licenses?

We were told to that Microsoft is taking them away, so we've stayed away from using the A1 licenses.

I believe A1 Plus is going, not regular A1

[Bugzi]

I've not checked lately, but does A1 keep their OneDrive storage?

 

When accounts get archived, do you just disable the account or do more things?

[Olliedawg]

3 minutes ago, Bugzi said:

I've not checked lately, but does A1 keep their OneDrive storage?

 

When accounts get archived, do you just disable the account or do more things?

 

It does, up to 100GB

[Rob_D]

6 minutes ago, Bugzi said:

When accounts get archived, do you just disable the account or do more things?

Their local storage is moved off our main file server to a nas (all 6mb of it), and the local accounts go in a dated OU to make the retention/deletion nice and easy.