Enabling litigation hold on O365

Enabling Litigation hold for O365 users

There are multiple ways to give access to an users who left organization

1) Place mail box in Litigation Hold
2) Convert to Shared mail box.

What is litigation Hold?

Place a mailbox on Litigation Hold to preserve all mailbox content, including deleted items and original versions of modified items. When you place a mailbox on Litigation Hold, the user's archive mailbox (if it's enabled) is also placed on hold. Deleted and modified items are preserved for a specified period or until you remove the mailbox from Litigation Hold.

when you place an Mail box in Litigation hold the mail will be preserved in X amount of days, we can give the mail box access to any person who has re-placed him in the organization.

all these mail boxes will be listed in the Inactive mail boxes and can we and can be attached to respective users who required access to the mails

Below are the commands to place the mail boxes in litigation hold

Connect to O365 power shell before executing below commands

To place an user to Litigation hold

The below command will place an particular mail box under litigation hold for 10 Years

Set-Mailbox ramesh@contoso.com -LitigationHoldEnabled $true -LitigationHoldDuration 3665

The Below command will place mail box under litigation hold for indifinate years

Set-Mailbox ramesh@contoso.com -LitigationHoldEnabled

Enable Litigation hold for all the O365 users

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -Filter {RecipientTypeDetails -eq "UserMailbox"} | Set-Mailbox -LitigationHoldEnabled $true -LitigationHoldDuration 3665

Enable Litigation hold for only not enabled users

Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.LitigationHoldEnabled -match "False"} | ForEach-Object {

$Identity = $_.alias; Set-Mailbox -Identity $Identity -LitigationHoldEnabled $True } 

Convert to Shared mail box

Once the users lefts the organization we can convert his mail box to an Shared mail box and we can retain the License, for shared mail boxes license is not required.
the mail box can be given access to the respective users for the left user's historical mail for compliance purpose   

Set-Mailbox -Identity <MailboxIdentity> -Type Shared

Set-Mailbox -Identity ramesh@contoso.com -Type Shared