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Leavers to be charged in Office 365

Email Archive Migration

U-turn on inactive mailbox charges

Free retention of ex-employee’s data

At present, if you want to retain the mailbox contents of former employees’ mailboxes there’s a facility called ‘Inactive Mailboxes’ that you can use.  The great thing is that if you follow Microsoft’s steps, you can re-use the licence associated with the ex-employees mailbox for someone else, so effectively there’s currently no charge for this facility.

Watch this space, however, as back in 2017 Microsoft was on the verge of introducing a charge for inactive mailboxes, and it’s our guess they could consider doing it again.

Inactive mailboxes could be chargeable…

Back in late 2017, Microsoft was on the verge of charging for inactive Office 365 mailbox licences.  It’s our prediction that this could happen again.

At the time, Microsoft faced a backlash from their customers and MVPs during Ignite 2017, and did a U-turn on charges for inactive mailboxes.

https://www.petri.com/no-licenses-office-365-inactive-mailboxes

Having seen the proposed licence plans, we’re not surprised it caused a stir. Inactive mailboxes represent a significant volume of data.

“When we do an analysis scan before moving email archives to Office 365, it’s not unusual for about 70% of the contents to belong to ex-employees” Annie Holder, Migration Consultant

The U-turn highlighted the demands that businesses are making on Microsoft to support proper governance of their email and other data.  Right now, the way Microsoft 365 helps you manage the full lifecycle and eDiscovery of email is impressive.

We will, however, watch with interest how Microsoft adapts to accommodating the vast churn of mailboxes from a licencing perspective.

Not just because of the potential future cost of retaining sheer volumes of it, but also because of a greater responsibility to keep it secure, minimise the risk it represents and fulfil obligations around data protection.

Managing data that doesn’t have ‘an obvious home’

Handling the retention of leaver’s mailboxes, SharePoint and OneDrives is sometimes still only part of the story.

Many cloud project teams are now turning their attention to other more complicated stores of data – like legacy Journals, public folders, PST files, file shares… data that sometimes doesn’t seem to have an obvious home in the Microsoft cloud.

Retention of content that doesn’t fit neatly into Office 365 (such as legacy data on file servers), is a topic we regularly address with our customers.

Inactive mailbox charges

If you have legacy on-premises content you want to preserve and do eDiscovery on, but you’re not sure where to start, get in touch.