The Mystery of One School Board’s Vanishing Microsoft Office 365 Storage Space
You don’t really think too much about Microsoft Office 365 storage space until you start to run out. That’s the situation that one of our clients was facing. They contacted us after they were informed by Microsoft that they needed to find a way to reduce the amount of storage they were using for their mail and SharePoint. The other alternative was to purchase more storage which they did not want to do.
This School Board is a large school system in the southern USA with over 10,000 full-time and part-time employees, almost6 7,000 teachers and certified employees in over 100 schools. They had over 350,000 users in their Microsoft 365 tenant. The school board had been notified that as of August 1, 2024, the education licenses would have new a storage policy where storage limits would now be calculated based on pooled storage and that of individual licenses. The change would impact the amount of storage available to them and would most likely require the board to buy more storage space.
Discovering why so much Microsoft Office 365 storage space was being used
The head of the IT department needed to know just how bad the situation with storage was and how to deal with it. The first step was to find out which users were using too much storage due to too many emails or too many emails with very large attachments. Once the team started investigating, they discovered that a previous consultant had set a litigation hold on all the mailboxes. When a mailbox has a litigation hold, any deleted emails are never permanently deleted, and this was the reason so much storage space was being used. The admin looked into releasing the deleted emails from litigation hold so the emails could be purged, and storage space could be freed up. However, releasing deleted emails would only be viable for some accounts – some accounts may still need to have the litigation holds.
The IT admin knew that you could use a PowerShell script to release the litigation hold on all accounts, but PowerShell would not be the solution when you needed to remove the hold on selected accounts. To make matters worse, the admin staff was not comfortable using PowerShell.
Using the Admin portal was not an option either. With so many users in his Microsoft 365 environment, removing the hold one by one was not feasible – it would be too time consuming. The IT admin was hoping sapio365 would be able to do the job, so he reached out to our team for a little guidance.
sapio365 offers IT teams some powerful capabilities, including full visibility of all user data in one place. With this information easily available, you can use sapio365’s wide range of filters to drill down to find whatever data you need. It also provides the ability to preview any changes before committing to them. This eliminates the risk of unexpected errors that can happen with PowerShell scripts.
The easy way to disable litigation holds in Microsoft Office 365
Custom reporting is also quick and easy with sapio365, and the report they created included properties like departments, locations, schools, the litigation hold status along with the amount of storage used by each mailbox.
Now that they could see all the accounts and the details they needed, they could move forward on removing the litigation hold but because of the sheer volume of users, this was done in batches. Using sapio365’s powerful reporting features, the IT team organized the mailboxes into batches and started with the users who had very large and bloated mailboxes.
Using the batch system, the team processed approximately 600 mailboxes in just a few minutes and a few clicks. As the team went through each batch and remove the litigation hold for selected mailboxes, they were able to preview the accounts for a final check to confirm they had the right ones.
With the litigation hold removed, old emails could be permanently deleted freeing up precious real estate in the storage pool.
Once the team had reviewed all the accounts, they scheduled a weekly report to make sure that the storage limits were not exceeded again. This reporting allowed them to monitor any mailboxes that were approaching a maximum storage capacity.
What would have a been a very long and tedious job was done in a few hours without the need for PowerShell scripting. Being able to remove the litigation hold on selected accounts freed up enough Microsoft Office 365 storage space and avoided the need to purchase additional storage space. A versatile tool like sapio365 offers solutions to an IT admin’s most challenging jobs. If you’re facing a tough challenge, why not discover everything that sapio365 can do.
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