Updated November 23, 2022: We have updated the content below with additional information. Thank you for your patience.
This message is related to moving (offboarding) users who have auto expanding archive enabled from exchange online to on-premises servers.
When this will happen
Preview: We will begin rolling out mid-November 2022 and expect to complete by late November 2022
Standard Release: We will begin rolling out mid-December 2022 and expect to complete it by late December 2022
How this will affect your organization
For Exchange Online users who have auto expanding archives enabled, we will block offboarding/moving their mailboxes to on-premises. This is because offboarding/moving content from auto-expanding archives is not a supported feature today. Please see details in the public documentation regarding Enable auto-expanding archiving. To quote “Auto-expanding archiving is supported for cloud-based archive mailboxes in an Exchange hybrid deployment for users who have an on-premises primary mailbox. However, after auto-expanding archiving is enabled for a cloud-based archive mailbox, you can’t off-board that archive mailbox back to the on-premises Exchange organization. Auto-expanding archiving isn’t supported for on-premises mailboxes in any version of Exchange Server.”
Scope:
- If you have an account with auto-expanding archives enabled
- You cannot offboard the archive (main or auxiliary archive). This was always an unsupported feature, but we are now programmatically restricting it.
- You can continue to offboard the primary mailbox (no change here)
- No Change to the following scenarios:
- If you have an account with a regular (no auto expanding archive enabled) archive
- you can offboard both primary and archive for that account (no change here)
What you need to do to prepare
Mailbox migrations to on-premises from auto expanding archives is not supported. Any on-going migrations will fail. The change we are putting out is to fail early and gracefully with no data loss by adding a check whether the auto-expanding archive exists for a user.
Message ID: MC467234
Published: 2022-11-15
Updated: 2022-11-23
Product: Exchange
Platform: Online, World tenant
Alex Lim
Alex Lim is a certified IT Technical Support Architect with over 15 years of experience in designing, implementing, and troubleshooting complex IT systems and networks. He has worked for leading IT companies, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco, providing technical support and solutions to clients across various industries and sectors. Alex has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the National University of Singapore and a master’s degree in information security from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the author of several best-selling books on IT technical support, such as The IT Technical Support Handbook and Troubleshooting IT Systems and Networks. Alex lives in Bandar, Johore, Malaysia with his wife and two chilrdren. You can reach him at [email protected] or follow him on Website | Twitter | Facebook
