ProTek IT Solutions has migrated countless customers from multiple email platforms to Microsoft’s Office 365 for Business Email and Productivity Cloud Solutions. Such as various cPanels, Plesk, Google Apps for Business, Godaddy Workspace Email, Godaddy Office 365, 1&1 Email and much more. Done correctly this can be done with next to no downtime for a company’s email solution.
ProTek fully supports and manages its customers Microsoft Office 365 solutions and customizes them to their needs.
Setting office 365 Retention Policy & Online Email Archiving
In this article we layout one approach to archiving your old emails in Office 365 to free up space when you get close to the storage limits. There are a lot of customizable options so there is no attempt to layout everything that can be done with archiving. Also company policies vary regarding the strictness of online archiving and so the below are only suggestions that can be adapted.
Office 365 Rentention Policy
Microsoft Office 365 offers an additional 50GB – 100GB of online archive storage space depending on the license assigned (if a user has a license with 50GB of standard mailbox storage, they will have 50GB of online archive, 100GB of standard=100GB online archive). By default this is disabled for each user and must be manually set up using retention tags and policies. Below are instructions for setting up online archiving for a user.
Before you get started you need to find out from the end user what an acceptable archiving time period is. i.e. how many years of information do they have to be able to immediately see and easily search for when doing any daily Outlook search. Do they need to see emails going back further than 5 years on a daily basis or would that be a special circumstance, like maybe once a month or so?
Based on that you can apply the applicable retention tags and policies to the user.
Once you have applied the needed retention configuration, you’ll want to give it a couple of days and check their mailbox to ensure it has actually archived everything beyond 5 years if that was what you set it at. Archiving will happen every 24 hours.
The below instructions setup the needed archiving rules so that they are enforced on the mailbox. We have not gone into details on all of the customizations that can be done – but there are options to allow users on their end to set their own archiving rules per folder or their own entire mailbox.
Online Email Archiving through Retention Tags
- Log in to the Microsoft 365 Admin portal then navigate to the Exchange Admin center, then select “Classic Exchange Admin Center”
- Go to “Compliance Management” then “retention tags”
- To create a new tag, select the plus button and choose “always apply to entire mailbox”
- Give the tag a name keeping with the names of any other tags you make for naming consistency, such as “Default 5 Year Move to Archive”, choose “Move to Archive” and input the number of days before an item is moved to archive
- Next, create a retention policy using the tag that was just created. Navigate to the “retention policies” tab and click the plus icon.
- Give the policy a relevant name and then add the tag you just created, using the plus sign in the field below.
- Make sure to NOT include the following tags, Deleted Items tag and Junk Email tag (these are defaults that if included will delete everything from that respective folder after 30 days). We don’t want to do that unless explicitly coordinated. And even then, we don’t want someone accidentally selecting one of these policies and not realizing that these Deleted Item and Junk Email are a part of it.
So if these default tags are ever to be used, they should be used on a custom retention policy that has the user’s name or email address as part of the title so it’s only designated for that.
NOTE: Only one retention policy can be applied to a user, but several tags can be made part of the policy
- Go to recipients and select the user you wish to set archiving for.
- On the right-hand side select “Enable” under In-Place Archiving
- Double click on the user and go to mailbox features
- Assign the Retention Policy you created earlier
- Log in to outlook.office.com (OWA) and verify that archiving is showing up underneath the users primary email. After some time you will also see a mailbox appear in their Outlook underneath their other mailboxes called “Online Archive – Person’s Name”
- As covered earlier, check back in a few days to ensure archiving is working as it should
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