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Does the Auto Expanding Archive feature work on M365 Business Standard?

Anonymous
2024-12-18T18:43:50+00:00

One of our users with a M365 Business Standard subscription is running out of space for his emails. He is a consistently heavy user of email with several years worth of large emails that need to be retained online. He's receiving daily warnings that his 50Gb archive mailbox is nearly full.

I have previously enabled Archiving on his account and have now turned on Auto Expanding Archive using PowerShell but so far it hasn't made any difference to the size of his archive storage limit.

Do I just need to wait a few days for the changes to take effect or buy an additional Exchange Online Archiving license for the auto-expanding feature to work on his M365 Business Standard subscription? Or do I have to upgrade his subscription to M365 Business Premium?

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-12-19T23:36:55+00:00

    Many thanks for your kind response,

    • May I please double confirm if you are on Exchange Hybrid or Pure Exchange Online environment?
    • May I please double confirm if the remaining free space for the archive mailbox is less than 10 GB?
    • May I please know if you have set a retention policy to automatically move old emails to archive mailbox?

    If you are on pure Exchange Online environment, you may need to purchase and assign Exchange Online Archiving for Exchange Online license instead of Exchange Online Archiving for Exchange Server license. You can refer to Exchange Online Archiving service description - Service Descriptions | Microsoft Learn

    Typically, if the user assigned proper license and user's archive mailbox is nearing its limit, auto-expanding archiving should automatically add additional storage. This way, Auto-expanding archive will provide a growth rate that does not exceed 1 GB per day. So that, you may need to ensure that this feature is enabled. therefore, you can refer to Enable auto-expanding archiving | Microsoft Learn to confirm this feature is enabled properly for your organization.

    I look forward to your update. Please feel free to let me know how it goes or if I got you wrong. If you still have any concerns, please let me know so I can provide more suggestions.

    Thank you for your precious time. Have a nice day.

    Sincerely,

    Libeamlak | Microsoft Community Moderator

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-12-23T17:06:12+00:00

    It turns out that it was indeed a licence issue. Once I bought a subscription for Exchange Online Archiving for Exchange Online, the user's archive limit was upgraded so problem now solved!

    Many thanks again for your speedy responses.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-12-19T13:00:38+00:00

    Thanks for the quick response and I've now set up a 1 month trial of Exchange Online Archiving for Exchange Server licence. I've assigned it to the user but it still hasn't made any difference to his archive storage limits.

    I understood that an additional 10Gb storage would be automatically allocated while full provisioning took place over the next 30 days. Do I need to do something else as well?

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-12-18T19:31:14+00:00

    Dearjamiesop

    Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community.

    To answer your question "Does the Auto Expanding Archive feature work on M365 Business Standard?"

    ==> The Auto Expanding Archive feature is not available for Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscriptions. This feature is typically available for higher-tier plans such as M365 Business Premium or Microsoft 365 enterprise license like E3 or E5.

    To have this feature, you may need to upgrade your user license to Microsoft 365 Business premium or higher plan. This plan offers more storage and includes the Auto Expanding Archive feature, which can automatically increase the archive mailbox size up to 1.5 TB when the storage quota is reached.

    Alternatively, you may consider purchasing an Exchange Online Archive license, this add-on can be used with M365 Business Standard to enable the Auto Expanding Archive feature.

    Therefore, if you have already enabled the Auto Expanding Archive using PowerShell and it hasn't taken effect, it is because the feature is not supported on the current subscription which is Microsoft 365 Business Standard. Upgrading the subscription or purchasing the appropriate license should resolve the issue.

    For additional information, you can refer to Exchange Online limits - Service Descriptions | Microsoft Learn

    I hope this information will help. if you have any other question or need further clarification, please feel free to let me know.

    Thank you for your precious time. Have a nice day.

    Sincerely,

    Libeamlak | Microsoft Community Moderator

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