Removing Accounts and Disabling Mailboxes (Possibly deleting from Vault)

[jason_lucy]

What are some of the "best practices" for removing accounts and disabling mailboxes?  In version 7.5 I have found that I manually have to remove a name from Provisioning Groups, if a network account has been deleted (which is difficult because the items in Provisioning Groups cannot be sorted).  

After removing the account from Provisioning Groups, what are some best practices to handle keeping or disabliing mailboxes?   What about removing email from Vault?

Thank you,

Jason

[MichelZ]

Jason

This depends on your company policies.

Do you have to retain the Data or not?
If you don't have to, is there any chance that you would have to restore deleted data because someone needs it?

That's not a general question to answer.

If you need to delete it, then you would probably:

- Remove from Provisioning Group
- Delete archive
- Delete Account & Mailbox

Cheers

[colin_dalziel]

Hi,

We're formulating a new policy to deal with the same issues posted by Jason.

Just to make it as complicated as possible, we're in the middle of implementing Enterprise Vault as part of a migration from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2007. We've inherited a large number of Disabled AD User Accounts, mostly former employees,  with associated Exchange 2000 mailboxes which have not yet been purged.

What isn't clear from any documentation or forum posts is the result of disabling archiving on a mailbox by removing it from a Provisioning Group. When the maibox is disabled for Provisioning, are previously vaulted items restored to the mailbox in their full state i.e. EV shortcuts replaced by the original item?

The approach we'd like to take is to disable vaulting for the legacy AD accounts, create a *.pst backup archive for each mailbox, just in case we receive subsequent requests to access the ex-employees data, then purge the mailbox from Exchange. We want to avoid migrating ex-employee mailboxes to our new Exchange 2007 environment but of course we don't want to create *.pst archives full of EV shortcuts.

When the migration is complete we'll adapt the process to suit future employee movements.

Thanks in advance for any guidance anyone can offer.

[MichelZ]

No, if you disable a user for archiving, it will not restore the items to exchange, it simply won't archive more things into Enterprise Vault from this user.

My suggestion:
Try to do a "Former Employee" Provisioning Group & Policies
Then, depending on your needs, do the following:

-> Let it delete all shortcuts in the user's mailbox
-> Then you can export 2 PST Files, one from the active mailbox, and one from the Archive
-> Then you can delete the mailbox & archive


OR 

-> Set the Policy to archive everything
-> Then delete the mailbox
-> and leave the archive in place

Cheers