Skip to main content

Archiving Mailboxes in the Office 365 World

In the Domino world, we used to just change the access controls on NSFs and copy or replicate them directly from the server to a PC but since we've moved to Outlook, and specifically  to Office 365, getting those mail files from the cloud has been an increasingly difficult business. 

To be fair, this was difficult under IBM as well, once we moved into the Verse cloud. 

Your Current Procedures aren't Working

When I first started trying to get backups of files, I had a lot of people tell me how easy it was. I followed their advice -- and yes, it was easy.  After all, there's a menu option inside outlook that lets you export directly to a PST file.

It was too easy. I was suspicious though. Suspicious that a person with a 10 year occupation could have a mail file that was a mere 400 MB. I looked into it and sure enough, the outlook method only gives you a recent subset of your data.

If you've been backing up PSTs from the cloud using outlook, you're missing a lot of data. 


Does the Problem Need Solving?

Before I go into the details of how to solve this problem, it's worth mentioning that there is another workaround that might be more suitable. I'm talking about Shared Mailboxes.

In Office 365, you can convert a user's mailbox to a shared mailbox and allow other people to access it. The downside of this is that you no longer have a perfect legal representation of that mailbox as it was when the user left (as new users could potentially edit, delete and add to it).  The good news is that shared mailboxes don't consume office licences though unfortunately, you can't delete the original users from your active directory. They're still required to be present for the mailbox.

In our case,  we keep a copy of all mail files in PST format for our records - and we use shared mailboxes only when necessary to provide access when someone critical has left. Shared mailboxes of previous employees should generally be a fairly temporary thing. 


How to Archive to PST

The PST archiving process is a little convoluted but it's accurate as it gets the mail file information from eDiscovery. Once you have your PST, and you've tested it of course, you can delete the user (or convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox).

So, without further ado, here's the instructions via slideshare.

Comments

Way to go man, well done. Recommended for anyone curious about archiving in Exchange Online.
\
xcom 2 cheats said…
I'm wondering the same thing. It seems like Microsoft's aiming to complicate matters by limiting archive rights based on the user's subscription plan and changing well known names... so unnecessary.


Tom said…
Nice :D

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher