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How to remove mobile devices from your Office 365 tenant

Jun 6, 2015 by Dan Rose

When you first sync a device to your environment it creates a partnership between Office 365 and your device. You can see these partnerships for your entire organization by looking at the Users with Mobile Device report built into our advanced Office 365 delegated administration tool.

The mobile device market is one that is very fast-paced where people often replace their phones or tablets, often with their old models either thrown in a drawer or possibly reused by someone else. Identifying some of these old sync partnerships can be tricky, but using the Inactive Mobile Device report simplifies this problem. In the report, you can choose a particular interval to view.

One thing that we hear a great deal is how can we remove the old devices from Office 365. So, I hope this article goes some way to show the steps necessary to remove mobile devices from Office 365.

The options that I’ll be covering in this article require some form of elevated permissions to perform, so please ensure you have the right level of access required.

Removing devices using the Office 365 Portal

1. Log into the Office 365 Portal and select the Admin tile.

admin

2. In the right-hand panel select Admin > Exchange

3. Once in the Exchange Admin Center, select recipients and click the user you wish to update.

4. In the right-hand pane under mobile devices select view details

mobilesPNG

5. Select the partnership you would like to remove, click the delete button and Save.

Removing devices using Powershell

1. Connect to Exchange Online via Powershell.

2. Once you have a good connection, type in the following command to view your active partnerships.

Get-MobileDevice -Mailbox dan@cogmotive.com | select DeviceModel, Identity

mobiles2PNG

3. To remove an active partnership you can simply type in the following command, where <Identity> is the long string output from step 2

Remove-MobileDevice -Identity <Identity>

4. Confirm Y if you wish to proceed.