Limitations of Office 365 Archiving

A company looking to cloud services for better facilities and features. Data loss and protection are the major concerns for any business migration and related plans. There is a lot of different strategies involved to make the transfer possible. It is a high-value transition and lots of expectations of clients and customer. What can damper the spirits is the limitations of Office 365 archiving? There are not many but enough to cause concern among users. It is important to have full knowledge before making any decision of moving to O365. All the related information has been mentioned in this post.

Limitations of Office 365 Archiving

Following are some of the many disadvantages of using O365 cloud services:Retention Limitations: The Microsoft offers many layers of protection to prevent end-users in Outlook and Exchange online. Emails being deleted are moved to the user’s Deleted Items folder. There is a 30-day retention policy in place after which they are permanently deleted. With the new strategy, there is indefinite retention time for Deleted Items in Outlook and Exchange Online. This policy increases protection, but items can be deleted permanently if chosen to. These items are then moved to the Recoverable Items-Deletions Folder.Now, the limitation arrives when a user leaves an organization. A manager may put in a request to delete the account. Before the employee leaves, a hold is placed on the mailbox. If this is not done before the account is deleted, emails within cannot be preserved. If there are legal proceeding or corporate investigation on the user, those conversations may never be presented as evidence. This is one of the many limitations of Office 365 archiving.OneDrive/SharePoint Retention Limitations: There is a facility called the Document Versioning. Unless it is switched on, the most recent version of the content is saved not the entire history. Using this features, users may be able to restore back to previous versions in case of accidental deletion. Like Outlook and Exchange Online, OneDrive also has a series of folders for protection. In this case, as well the deleted items stay in Recycle Bin for 93 days or until manual deletion. Once this threshold limit is reached, they are moved to Site Collection Recycle Bin. Once the retention settings in the Site Collection Recycle Bin exceeds the data is gone indefinitely.

Have Proper Office 365 Archiving Policy In Place

The information about the default retention policies have been briefly described in this post. There are options to customize retention settings according to user’s choice. There are some drawbacks to this, which has been mentioned here:

• First, the organization must be aware of all the policies. This can be time-consuming and inconvenient.
• Second, the feature to customize retention policy for Deleted Items is only available for Outlook or Exchange Online.
• Then, these policies are different for each plan and service of Office 365. There is a long process of multiple folders to recover one item.
• Also, there is no complete backup solutions and is meant to protect data loss in a limited way.

How to Overcome the Limitations of Office 365 Archiving

There are a number of ways to secure conversations. One is to have important information saved manually which may be a risky technique. There are non-technical businessmen who look for workarounds to archive Office 365 mailbox. It is recommended to use Office 365 Mailbox Backup tool. It provides multiple options to archive emails, contacts, calendar to required formats. It can be used in two different ways: using admin credentials and without it. There is a facility to save selective user account data to PST, MSG, and EML. The tool is compatible with all the available versions of Windows 10/8.1/8/7/XP and earlier ones.

Conclusion

A lot of investigation that goes into moving to a new platform. A careful planning and multiple strategies in place. There are multiple security and backup compliance concerns. There are many limitations of Office 365 archiving. This is an important information which must be known to all users. There are enough relevant details mentioned in the post to make an informed decision. There is also a relevant Office 365 archive tool suggested which can be used instead. It is reliable, better, faster and much more efficient. There is a demo version available which can be downloaded for free. It can be tried before making any decision on purchasing the activation key.