There may be a requirement to retain all mailbox data of employees who have left an organisation or have taken an extended leave of absence. Exchange Online provides this functionality in the form of \u201cinactive mailboxes\u201d. An inactive mailbox is a mailbox which has been placed on \u201clitigation\u201d hold or has had a specially configured retention policy applied.<\/p>\n
Litigation Hold (or Legal Hold) is a special function which places the entire mailbox (or entire tenant if configured to do so) on indefinite hold. Once this has been applied to a mailbox or tenant, all data will be retained going forward, including items which are deleted \u201cpermanently\u201d by a user. These items will disappear from the user\u2019s viewpoint but from an e-discovery standpoint – these items will be fully discoverable. It is important to note that in order to place a mailbox on Litigation Hold, the mailbox will need to be licensed appropriately (Exchange Plan 2, E3\/E5 licensing).<\/p>\n
Retention Policies can also be configured and applied to retain mailbox contents indefinitely. Just remember to configure to only retain data as retention policies will continue to be active and process the policy even after the mailbox has been made inactive. So, if the policy was also configured to delete items, the items will eventually be deleted and purged from the recoverable items folder. It is also important to note, if a retention policy is just configured to delete items (to move them into the recoverable items folder), the mailbox cannot be converted into an inactive mailbox. The policy must be configured to \u201cretain\u201d data.<\/p>\n
So now that we\u2019ve briefly discussed the two options available to create an inactive mailbox, let\u2019s talk about how you create them. Quite simple actually, once Litigation Hold or a Retention Policy has been applied to the mailbox, delete the corresponding user from Office 365 or remove the license from the user. The mailbox will go into the process of \u201cdeletion\u201d. After the soft delete period, the mailbox will next be converted into an \u201cinactive mailbox\u201d. To view a list of all your inactive mailboxes, go into the \u201cData Governance\u201d section at https:\/\/protection.office.com<\/a><\/span> and click on \u201cRetention\u201d. Once on this page, click on the \u201c…\u201d icon and select \u201cInactive Mailboxes\u201d to view the list of mailboxes. The alternative way is through PowerShell with the following command:<\/p>\n Get-Mailbox -InactiveMailboxOnly<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the frequently asked questions which always comes up during migration projects is: \u201cCan we purchase 500 licenses and re-use them for inactive user migration?\u201d<\/p>\n This is a tricky question. Technically speaking, once a mailbox is made inactive, the license will be freed up and will be available for you to re-use. However, Microsoft\u2019s Volume Licensing Online Services Terms (latest version released on September 1, 2019) states the following:<\/p>\n Most, but not all, SLs may be reassigned. Except as permitted in this paragraph or in the Online Service-specific Terms<\/u>, Customer may not reassign an SL on a short-term basis (i.e., within 90 days of the last assignment). Customer may reassign an SL on a short-term basis to cover a user\u2019s absence or the unavailability of a device that is out of service. Reassignment of an SL for any other purpose must be permanent. When Customer reassigns an SL from one device or user to another, Customer must block access and remove any related software from the former device or from the former user\u2019s device.<\/p>\n What this really means is in order to be fully compliant, you can only safely un-assign a license from a mailbox 90 days after it was initially licensed. Migration of a mailbox can sometimes be done in a couple of hours. However, due to the above policy, the mailbox will need to remain licensed for a minimum of 90 days.<\/p>\n There may be ways around this, but you will need to seek permission from Microsoft to do this officially or if you have acquired licensing through a CSP perhaps, they may have different policies and allow the re-use of licenses immediately. Regardless of the scenario, it\u2019s always best to consult your licensing provider before re-using the licenses.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There may be a requirement to retain all mailbox data of employees who have left an organisation or have taken an extended leave of absence. Exchange Online provides this functionality in the form of \u201cinactive mailboxes\u201d. An inactive mailbox is a mailbox which has been placed on \u201clitigation\u201d hold or has had a specially configured… Continue reading Inactive Mailbox Licensing in Office 365<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-workplace","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23538,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions\/23538"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Re-Using Licenses in Migration<\/h3>\n