Best Practices for Managing Office 365 Employee Offboarding

In today’s hybrid and remote work culture, businesses mostly depend on Office 365 to keep their teams connected and productive. While hiring and onboarding often get the most attention, employee offboarding in Office 365 is often overlooked.

When an employee leaves your organization and still has access to Office 365, mishandling the confidential data can expose your company to security breaches, compliance issues, and unnecessary penalties.

To mitigate these risks, we offer an advanced SaaS management software, CloudFuze Manage, that simplifies user lifecycle management.

In this blog post, we will discuss the top 5 best practices for managing Office 365 employee offboarding.

Importance of Managing Office 365 Employee Offboarding

Office 365 employee offboarding helps you securely remove a departing team member’s access to Office 365 tools like Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint. By offboarding properly, you protect sensitive documents, maintain business workflow continuity, and avoid compliance risks.

Companies implement offboarding by disabling the user’s sign-in access, backing up or transferring their files, and revoking their Office 365 license. Then, IT admins update group memberships and permissions to ensure no undetected access remains.

This Office 365 employee offboarding process matters because it keeps your organization secure, saves costs by freeing up unused licenses, and ensures that no important files or conversations are lost during the transition.

Top 5 Best Practices for Managing Office 365 Employee Offboarding

Employee exits can create compliance and security gaps if you don’t handle Office 365 offboarding properly. To protect your company’s data and automate your user workflow process, follow these 5 tips:

1. Disable Office 365 Access of Departing Employees Immediately

As soon as an employee leaves your organization, revoke their Office 365 access to prevent unauthorized logins and protect sensitive data. Here’s what you should do once the employee says they are switching companies:

• Block the employee’s sign-in from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
• Reset their user’s password.
• Revoke all active sessions and tokens for the leaving employee.

2. Back Up and Transfer All the Employee Data

Before you delete the employee’s account, make sure you back up and transfer all important data to the right person. This step helps maintain business continuity and prevents data loss. Here are the most critical data that need to be backed up:

• Emails and Calendars
• OneDrive Files
• Teams Chats and Files
• Teams Chats and Files

3. Set Up Email Forwarding and Auto-Reply for the Ex-employee

Even after the employee leaves your organization, you must keep communication flowing by configuring the following:

• Email Forwarding: Redirect all incoming emails to a designated colleague.
• Auto-Reply Message: Let email senders know the employee has left and provide an alternative contact.

This simple step helps you maintain professionalism and avoid missed opportunities.

4. Remove Unused Office 365 Licenses and Reassign Resources Optimally

Once you secure the data, remove the Office 365 license from the user account. This helps you:

• Avoid paying for unused licenses.
• Reassign the license to a new hire.

Also, review and reassign shared resources like calendars, distribution lists, and shared mailboxes.

5. Document and Standardize the Process

Create a standardized employee offboarding checklist for Office 365. This final step makes sure that you follow the same steps every time and don’t miss anything important. Your checklist should include:

• Disabling Office 365 employee access.
• Backing up all relevant data of the employee.
• Setting up email forwarding to the departing employee.
• Removing the ex-employee’s Office 365 licenses.
• Archiving or deleting the departing employee’s account

Along with these best practices, use our specialized SaaS management software, CloudFuze Manage, to automate both employee onboarding and offboarding from a single dashboard in minutes.

CloudFuze Manage: The Best Employee Offboarding Software

Manual offboarding often is tedious and prone to errors. That’s why we offer CloudFuze Manage, a powerful SaaS management platform that automates the entire employee lifecycle process. Here’s what makes it the best choice for enterprises:

• Automated Office 365 and other SaaS Apps Access Revocation: Large enterprises can instantly revoke user access across Office 365 and other SaaS apps.
• Secure Office 365 Data Transfer: IT admins can move files, emails, and shared resources to the right owners without manual effort.
• Office 365 License Optimization: Businesses can automatically remove unused Office 365 licenses and reassign them to new hires.
• Compliance and Reporting: Audit-conscious companies can download detailed audit-ready reports for compliance requirements.
• Multi-App Onboarding/Offboarding: Organizations with more than 1000 employees can manage employee onboarding and offboarding across multiple SaaS platforms from one dashboard.

Manual Offboarding vs. CloudFuze Manage

Also, check out our SaaS management tools’ advanced feature in this short video:

Why Choose CloudFuze Manage?

In addition to the top 5 best practices for managing Office 365 employee offboarding, businesses and large enterprises can use our SaaS management platform to automate repetitive IT tasks, save valuable time, and reduce SaaS security risks to a great extent.

Also, CloudFuze Manage gives you complete control over Office 365 management and makes employee offboarding stress-free.

Contact us for a free demo!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the difference between blocking sign-in and deleting an Office 365 account?

When you block sign-in, you immediately stop the user from accessing Office 365 while keeping their data intact for backup or transfer. When you delete the same Office 365 account, you permanently remove the user and their data after retention. It’s recommended to go with the block sign-in option in CloudFuze Manage when you’re unsure about an employee returning.

2. Can I integrate other SaaS apps besides Office 365 with CloudFuze Manage?

Yes, you can govern over 50 major cloud-based apps, including Office 365, with our SaaS management platform.

3. Is CloudFuze Manage secure?

Absolutely. We use enterprise-grade security protocols, role-based access controls, and audit logs to make sure your confidential data and user workflows are protected.