Office 365 allows its users to control the settings of the functions according to their needs. Data archiving is also an important aspect for data storage and security of old data. But when we archive the data in Office 365 mailboxes, it should be noted that there is a certain time specified in the archived email, in a separate folder, where the mailbox is permanently deleted from there.

Let’s take an example – let’s say you have deleted about 20 old or unused mailboxes from your Office 365 account and these mailboxes are stored in the archive mailbox. Let’s say its 3 years of defined storage time in an office 365. After this period, all 20 mailboxes in the archive email will be deleted forever automatically. Therefore, today in this article, we are going to discuss the topic – how we can manage this policy for archiving and deleting Office 365 mailboxes.

You should be aware that in Office 365, there is a way to create a retention policy by adding retention tag that gives you certain storage labels through which you can manage to archive and delete elements of old Office 365 mailboxes.

Get started – Setup Archive and Deletion Policies for Office 365 Mailboxes

To perform this action, first of all you must be a global administrator with office 365 or administrative rights. Sign in to your office 365 account with a global administrator credentials. After logging in just enable the archive mailboxes for Office 365 users. Follow these steps:

1. Just press the ‘admin’ option and then select ‘Security and Compliance Center’ from the right panel.
2. Now move to Data Governance and click Archive.
3. All user mailboxes will get enlisted. Here select all mailbox users using the Shift key and then on the left panel under the ‘Bulk Edit’ option, click the ‘Enable’ button.
4. A warning confirmation message will appear on the screen. Click on ‘Yes’ option to confirm the action.
5. ‘Enable’ the archive mailbox for each selected mailbox.
6. Once the process completes, click ‘Refresh’ to update the list on the ‘Archive’ page.

CREATING RETENTION TAGS

For Archiving- Archiving Default Policy Tag

1. In the ‘security and compliance Center’ >> click ‘App launcher’ in the upper left corner.
2. Then Click ‘Admin’ option >>‘Admin Centers’ and select ‘Exchange’ option under it.
3. The page of the exchange admin center will be opened. Select the ‘Compatibility Center’ here and then click ‘Retention Tags’. Click the plus icon and select ‘applied automatically to entire mailbox (default)’ option.
4. In the opened page, complete the following fields:

Name: fill any name for the retention tag
Retention action: Select the option Move to Archive from the given options Delete and Allow Recovery, Permanently Delete and go to Archive
Retention period: here type the number of days (as you require)

After filling all these details, just click on ‘Save’ option.

For Deleted Items Folder- Custom Retention Policy Tag

1. Go back to the ‘Exchange Admin Center’ in office 365, as was done in the previous step. Then click on ‘Compliance Governance’, and then click ‘Retention Tags’.

2. On the ‘Retention tags’ page, click plus icon, and then select ‘applied automatically to a default folder’.
3. On the ‘New tag applied automatically to a default folder’ page, enter the details like name, this time choose retention action as Permanently Delete, and enter the Retention period in number of days.
4. Click on ‘Save’ option to save the entries.

Similarly, you can select another option to delete and permission to recover from the retention action. Here the items are deleted after a specified period and the option to restore is set after 14 days (default).

CREATING NEW RETENTION POLICY

1. In Exchange Admin Center of Office 365, Navigate to Compliance Center > select Retention policies.
2. Click the plus option and open a new policy page. Write the name here. In the Retention Tags category, click on the plus icon, and then, if necessary, select the created retention tags listed above along with other possible tabs. Click the Add option to add tags, and then click OK
3. Then review this new retention tags and click Save.

ASSIGNING NEW RETENTION POLICY TO MAILBOXES

1. Move to the ‘Exchange Administration Center’ page again in Office 365. Click here on ‘Recipients’ and then select Mailboxes.
2. Select all the recovered mailboxes (or select selective users) and then on the left side, click ‘More’. Now under the ‘Retention Policy’, click the ‘Update’ option.
3. The policy page for keeping ‘bulk assignments retention policy’ opens. Here, select the created policy from the drop-down menu and click ‘Save’.

This will create a newly formed Retention policy in Office 365 for user mailboxes. In 7 days, Office 365 user mailboxes will be added to this new policy. Also, if you want to keep Office 365 data in a safe place, you can try the most effectual and proficient third party solution – Export Office 365 to PST software. It supports all versions and plans of Office 365 and quickly stores the required data in Outlook PST format.

There are many privileges that come with a popular Microsoft Office 365 application. One of those features is that it offers a shared mailbox. The Office 365 administrator can at any time create a shared mailbox with the Office 365 interface and instruct full members to access the data in this mailbox (share or receive data). To share information about meeting details and other activities, the shared mailbox also includes a calendar function. The most important aspect of a shared mailbox is that the administrator does not need a license if he holds 50 GB of data. However, in order to store more than 50 GB of data, you need to purchase a license.

Need for Converting User Mailbox to Shared Mailbox

Microsoft Office 365 allows successful conversion of the regular mailbox to Shared mailboxes of Office 365 account. It also allows reversed conversion, shared mailbox to the regular user mailbox. But the main question arises that why users wants this conversion? Let us try to understand with the help of some scenarios mentioned below:

Scenario 1: When an organization wants to share some information with multiple specific users, from a user mailbox and requires that with the help of this data, the team can work on the same project.

Scenario 2: When some former employees leave the organization and have a license, their mailbox needs data backup. It is now possible to convert, to release the license, as well as to specify the data.

Scenario 3: When the manual migration method, such as cut or staged migration, is carried out in office 365, shared mailboxes is migrated in the same way as user mailboxes. These mailboxes will be valid for 30 days without a license. To avoid this licensing price, the users can convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox.

All scenarios indicate the need to convert the Office 365 user mailbox into a shared mailbox. In the next section, we’ll learn how to convert a user’s mailbox to Office 365 shared mailbox.

IMPORTANT: if you are looking for migration then one important thing that you have to keep in mind before moving forward for conversion process is that the user’s mailbox must be licensed before converting to a shared mailbox. Otherwise, you will find it very difficult to see the ‘Convert the Mailbox’ option.

Convert User Mailbox to Shared Mailbox in Office 365

If you want to convert a regular mailbox to Office 365 shared mailbox (with allotted license), follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Office 365 accounts, with proper Global Administrator details.
2. Click on the ‘Admin’ option that opened on the screen.
3. The Office 365 Admin Center window will open. Click here on ‘active users’ option.
4. Now select mailbox of user from the list for conversion and click ‘Mail Settings’ option.
5. Next, click the Convert to shared mailbox option to convert it to shared mailbox.

6. The final confirmation message will appear. Confirm the convert option by clicking on it

7. A message will appear on screen, successful conversion of the user’s mailbox. Click Close.

8. Now, you can find your converted mailbox in the shared mailbox category.

Sometimes the situation may change and you may need help to transfer your shared mailbox to the user mailbox. Let’s see how it happens;

1. Open an Office 365 account by entering administrator credentials.
2. Go to the Office Admin Center and just click on Exchange from the right panel list.
3. Now, navigate to Recipient>>Shared. Select the desired shared mailbox for conversion and then go to the left panel. Click Convert option under Convert to Regular Mailbox.

• A final warning message will appear for confirmation. Click ‘Yes’ to proceed.

• The conversion process will begin. After some time, depending on the size of the data, the conversion process will end with a message. Click Close.
• You can find the changed user mailbox under the mailbox category.
• Don’t forget to license this converted mailbox as it will only work for 30 days without a license.

Thus, after giving a lot of the explanations listed above, I hope that by now users have learned how a user’s can convert their mailbox to shared mailbox and a shared mailbox to Office 365 user mailbox as well. It is further possible to implement this manual method of converting mailboxes into Office 365 as it’s so simple and easy. You can try it once for confirmation.

For users who need to backup their Office 365 data to a secure location, including shared mailbox data, they can follow the Office 365 to PST software which is the most reliable tool. It easily backups the required data from all mailboxes in Office 365 to PST format at system location. Users can access this Outlook file at any time in their Outlook application. The device has an excellent interface with easy-to-understand features and icons. Users can visit the software website to clarify their views on this particular tool.

Final Words

Migration from regular mailboxes to shared mailboxes and shared mailboxes to regular mailboxes is well demonstrated with in-built Office 365 features. License is also considered when converting mailboxes. The Office 365 data security concern is met with the advanced third party tool Office 365 Backup and Restore software.

In this blog, we are going to explore the archive function in Office 365 to backup required Office 365 mailboxes in a separate folder called Archive Mailbox.

The archive function is introduced for backup of old e-mail or data that is not currently required. Also, in Office 365, the archive function is available and it is known as In-place archive. This archive technology transfers e-mail from Office 365 mailboxes to the archive folder and helps to increase storage space inside the Office 365 account.

In order to archive user mailboxes in Office 365, the Office 365 administrator or authorized user must be able to enable the archive mailbox in the Office 365 account interface. Once this option is enabled in Office 365, users can transfer email from their primary mailboxes to the archive folder easily in the Outlook on the web (which is formerly known as Outlook Web App) or via Microsoft Outlook. The ability to store some archival mailboxes by the archive mailbox is unlimited.

How to Enable Archive Mailboxes in Office 365?

Use the following steps to enable the Archive option for Office 365 mailboxes:

1. Sign-in to your Office 365 account with administrative credentials
2. On the left panel, under Security and Compliance, select Data Governance and then click Archive.
3. On the page of the opened archive, each mailbox is shown with an archive mailbox column that has the status turned on or off. Here, select the desired mailbox that displays the disabled status and click the Enable button.
4. A warning message is displayed stating that “If you enable the archive mailbox,” items in the user’s mailbox that are older than the archive policy assigned to the mailbox (2 years) will be moved to a new archive mailbox. “Click Yes. To proceed and select the mailbox for which you want to enable “Archive mailbox.
5. After a much shorter time, the status of the user’s mailbox column will be enabled.

To create an archive for multiple users’ mailboxes with the same status at once, users can select them with the use of Ctrl key and by enabling the archive Office in 365 mailboxes, in the details panel. Similarly, you can disable status also. You can also use this PowerShell cmdlets to ‘enable or disable’ your archive mailboxes in Office 365 within short time. To enable an archival mailbox for one user, try this cmdlet:

Enable-Mailbox -Identity -Archive

And if you want to enable the archive mailbox of all mailboxes within the organization, then you required running this cmdlet:

Get-Mailbox -Filter {ArchiveStatus -Eq “None” -AND RecipientTypeDetails -eq “UserMailbox”} | Enable-Mailbox –Archive

Thus, in this way you can easily enable or disable the archive mailbox for the desired user mailbox in Office 365.

Learn to Archive Emails in Office 365

If the archive mailbox is enable (selected or all users mailboxes in Office 365), you can archive emails by following these steps one by one;

1. Log in to your office 365 administrative accounts and then open Outlook.
2. Select the emails from any Outlook folder and then right-click on it. Now select the Archive option. Or you can directly click on Archive option on the top pane.
3. Select an email from any Outlook folder and right-click on it. A wizard will appear on the screen. Hit the “Archive” button to move these emails to the archive mailbox.
4. To do this, you will transfer the e-mail of your choice from the user’s mailbox to the archive folder easily.

Shortcomings in Manual Archiving

However, it seems to be a simple and easy task in the explanations listed above to archives emails of Office 365 user’s mailboxes, but there is a lack of flexibility and not only this, when you select e-mails manually from your mailboxes, it takes a lot of time and effort.

What Better You Can Do?

Instead of Archive e-mails with the above-mentioned manual process, Office 365 users can archive the desired email by taking a backup copy of the data in Office 365 mailboxes by using a trustworthy tool. Office 365 to PST software is a reliable solution that allows you to select the desired email via different filter options and automatically save the data to the system location. This shows the compatibility of all Office 365 plans and subscriptions. You can use the free demo version to evaluate the software features by yourself after downloading it from the website. Based on complete satisfaction with the tool, you can purchase the full version at any time via online purchase. So, it is advisable to use the manual trick of e-mail archiving if you need to migrate entire mailboxes, but if you have multiple e-mail archives or backups selected from mailboxes, try the most promising Office 365 backup solution with automated backup and advanced filters.

Have you heard that data even in Office 365 environment requires security? That’s right. No data can be considered secure on any platform, regardless of security measures. For the online environment, data breaches through hacker techniques have now become a serious issue, leading to data interruptions or data loss in minutes.

Office 365 allows you to save a large amount of information on it, so you need to follow certain practices to make sure that the data stored in the cloud is completely safe. Microsoft spends a lot of time on security programs and features to protect the data of Office 365 and other client programs. Since the topic of discussion is Office 365, so we will further learn about the measures or practices that Office 365 administrators can emulate to provide Office 365 mailboxes.

Some Useful Tips to Secure Office Mailboxes

• Adopt Strong Password Policy
• Utilize Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
• Enable Sender Protection Framework (SPF)
• Perform Mailbox Audit Logging
• Manage Access Rights
• Analyze with Office 365 Secure Score
• Office 365 Cloud App Security
• Get Latest Security Updates

 Adopt Strong Password Policy

The most common practice is for the administrator to select the best and most powerful password for the Office 365 account. Avoid the usual passwords, short password in terms of lengths, and repeated passwords anywhere else. Instead, create a password by combining the alphabet, numbers, and symbols to make it impossible for any attacker to rob and access your account. Also, the administrator can conduct a multifunctional authorization process so that any other person has difficulty reporting access to all services without permission.

Utilize Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

With Office 365 Data loss Prevention Function, the administrator can define classified data and policies that do not allow you to share your data externally. This will help you to resolve the possibility of any data leakage on the external environment. This feature includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive Office, allows users to comply with the policy.

Enable Sender Protection Framework (SPF)

The sender’s protection framework will allow other mail channels to also understand whether the mail they are receiving is from a certified source system or not. This way, it will avoid any spam or spoilage to get to other mail channels. Users can enable this SPF with DKIM and DMARC when creating their own domain.

Perform Mailbox Audit Logging

The function of entering a mailbox audit is given in Office 365, which requires you to activate (as not set by default) that you can visit the Office 365 under the Audit Journal in Security & Compliance Centre in Office 365. It contains information such as user-accessed mailboxes, actions performed by the user with permission, or by the administrator.

Manage Access Rights

Users can set various options to protect important documents that are sent by mistake, you can restrict it with read only rights or providing some encryption on it. Access rights may be established by assigning rules for expiration of content or by imposing restrictions, such as requesting a license, on accessing certain documents or mail sent to unofficial authority.

Analyze with Office 365 Secure Score

Microsoft has provided this systematic software, Office 365 Secure Score, which compares the current activity on the Office 365 account with the standard security settings set by Microsoft. It will help you analyze what is going wrong in the current settings and where there is a need for improvement in terms of data security. It delivers scores according to security standards set by the administrator and helps to ensure complete security control.

Office 365 Cloud App Security

This is an integrated feature in Office 365 that defines certain policies to protect Office 365 mailbox data from unwanted malicious actions. Users can use this app to create notification signals about any strange activities performed by any person inside or outside the organization. This will help identify situations such as attempts to log multiple unsuccessful logs, log in to an unrecognized IP address, and so on.

Latest Security Updates

To ensure the most efficient way to secure Office 365 mailbox data, the administrator must have the latest security updates provided by Office 365.

The above practice will help you to secure Office 365 mailboxes, but the best way to avoid any future catastrophe that could damage the data is to take a recent backup. Taking regular backup copies of Office 365 data is a safe administration for any administrator. For a backup copy of Office 365 mailboxes, you can trust the third-party Office 365 to PST Converter tool. It provides all the data of the backup office, whether mailboxes, groups, public folders or archival mailboxes in a very fast form and also offers a selection of backup data. The advanced tool offers many more amenities that you can study on its website. It supports all Office 365 plans and subscriptions to the backup program. The data remains integrated and secure throughout the backup process through this tool.

Summary

The blog deals with the security of Office 365 mailboxes. Some general practices are described for users that help them provide security of Office 365 data. It includes many built-in features and services offered by Microsoft. A third-party tool has also been introduced at the end to secure and migrate Office 365 mailbox data backup.