How do some companies manage disabled accounts in Exchange 2010?

Question

I'm wondering what the best practice is for "archiving" old disabled accounts in exchange. I work for a small health exchange company and the upper management wants any mailbox over 60 days old, backed up and off our network. So basically a .pst created for the mailbox, put on the network for a short time for it to be backed up to tape, then it is deleted (the mailbox and .pst).

I'm assuming most companies just disable the account and mailbox so that the mailbox goes into the "inactive" storage and leave it there.

Thanks for any input.

Answer 1

I don't think there is a one size fits all strategy.

Some of the clients I work with do one or some of the following.

Disable the mailbox for 30-90 days, then archive it to PST and delete the mailbox.

Set an autoforward to the appropriate individual replacing the user in question, and give the user full mailbox access.

Archive and delete the mailbox and assign the old email address to a catch all mailbox, or as a duplicate address to the new user.

Alternatively you could always disable the account and hide it from the GAL if you wanted to keep it readily available for longer than 60 days.