
11 Dec 2019 by Mike Weaver
Integration: The Final Step in Change Management
The final step in successful change management is the Integration stage. Here’s how to bring everything together. Watch now.
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Microsoft have now added a feature that allows you to keep a terminated employees mailbox on your Office 365 cloud environment even after you have deleted their user account and freed up their licence. This feature is called Inactive Mailboxes.
We do not charge you for these kinds of Inactive Mailboxes in our Office 365 reporting and management tool, so it’s a win-win!
This is a great way to ensure that their mailbox content is preserved in the event that you need to recover some of their mail later on. The mailbox can remain on Office 365 indefinitely without any cost to your company. Unfortunately it requires you to be using an Enterprise version of Office 365.
To do this you will need to follow these steps:
4. Create a new In-Place Hold Policy and call it Terminated Employees
5. Add the terminated user to the policy
6. Ensure that All Mailbox Content is preserved
7. Tick the box to enable the hold
8. You should now see the user on hold in the recipients section
9. Delete the Users Account from the Office 365 Administrator center. The mailbox is now deemed “Inactive” and the licence can be re-assigned
To view a list of all your Inactive Mailboxes in Office 365 you can use the following PowerShell cmdlet
PS C:\Users\alan\Desktop> Get-Mailbox -InactiveMailboxOnly
Name Alias ServerName ProhibitSendQuota
---- ----- ---------- -----------------
DavidL DavidL am3pr07mb0534 49.5 GB
Use an In-Place eDiscovery search to access the contents of the mailbox.
More information about how to perform these steps can be found at Microsoft’s Managing Inactive Mailboxes in Exchange Online TechNet article.
You can easily view a list of all your Inactive Mailboxes using our Inactive Mailbox Report.
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