Hi I am looking at a better way in dealing with staff leavers and what to do with their email account if a member of their team needs it open for a certain amount of time. We use Exchange 2007 Enterprise. What do other admins do in this situation? In most scenarios I would just delete their account. I am thinking for this user, maybe changing their password, login to it and create an out of office message so at least people emailing that person are aware. Is this the best way to do this? Are there any better ways of managing leavers in Exchange? Thanks

Hi Ranjb Tricky subject as a lot of this is going to come down to the politics of the situation, and for what purpose they want the mailbox kept active. Do they simply want access to existing mails, or are they concerned about fresh incoming mails going unanswered? One issue you definitely have to tackle is that of potentially having a mailbox that is slowly filling up that no one is watching. One solution you could do is setup a redirect on that mailbox that forwards all the mail to a team member who is taking over / has been delegated the leavers responsibilities, and not have the mail delivered to the original mailbox, and then grant your second user access to add the mailbox to their outlook profile as a shared mailbox. Now they can access all existing mail from that team member but are directly responsible for any new mail under their own mailbox. As any replies will be sent using their own address (and presumably signitures) most contacts will catch on pretty quick that roles have changed. Do you have any Archiving software etc that may throw other variables into the mix? Do you have any liscence costs associated with Users / Mailboxes that could factor into how long you are willing to keep unused objects around? If the team aren't concerned with existing mail but want new mails to go to a person rather than bounce, you could always delete the account and then add the old email addresses to the replacement / delegated team member.

Hi,You can first configure the OOF on the leaved staff, then disable the user account in the AD. That will make the user account not log on the computer. Then set the forward email address to the other members on the leaved statff.After doing this, the sender will receive the OOF and the message also could be forwarded to other members.ThanksAllen

Hi, what I do usually depends on the position a user held. If for example they were a head of department, the chances are that there will be lots of current messages in their mailbox so I cannot just delete the account. In these cases once I have added the new user to the system I will give them full access to the previous user's account and add it in to their profile and ask them to start either moving the messages to their folders or to a .pst.After a month or so and all the messages have been dealt with and the original mailbox is redundant I remove it. I then add the previous user's email address to their replacement's account so any further emails will arrive in the new person's mailbox rather than just bounce.If it is a minor member of staff I usually remove the account within a day or so of their leaving.I.T. Manager International House London