A new starter is prepared before day one. A leaver is handled on the day. In between, most small businesses improvise: an account created in a hurry with far too much access, a former employee whose phone is still receiving email three weeks after they’ve gone. A short procedure, written once, takes care of both.
Joining: everything ready before day one
A new person’s first morning shouldn’t be spent hunting for a password. A few days ahead, their Microsoft 365 account is created with sign-in protection already on. They’re added to the right groups, which gives them their department’s Teams, SharePoint folders and shared mailboxes, and only those. Granting every access “to be on the safe side” just widens what a compromised account could reach.
If the laptop is managed, it can be delivered straight to the person’s home. They switch it on, sign in with their account, and the machine sets itself up: apps installed, security settings applied, files synced. Nobody had to prepare it by hand. It’s one of the most practical uses of managed devices.
Leaving: on the day, in the right order
A leaver is handled on their last day, ideally at the hour they leave. The order matters.
Sign-in is blocked first and every open session closed. Changing the password isn’t enough: a phone that’s already signed in can keep receiving email for a while. Blocking cuts access on every device.
Then what belongs to the business is recovered. The mailbox becomes a shared mailbox, handed to whoever takes over, so client emails keep landing somewhere. OneDrive files are transferred to a manager. Finally the person is removed from groups, shares and any outside service where they held an account in the company’s name.
The laptop goes one of two ways. If it’s managed, it can be wiped remotely wherever it is, then reissued. If it isn’t, it has to be collected and reset by hand, which gets awkward when the person worked from the other end of the country.
The trap of deleting too fast
Deleting the account feels like the safest move. It’s often the most costly. By default, Microsoft deletes a removed account’s OneDrive after thirty days, and a deleted mailbox goes with its email. A Microsoft 365 backup covers that risk, but the right habit is still to recover first and delete afterwards.
Who takes care of it
Joiners and leavers are part of what we handle day to day in the Cloud offer: you tell us, we do the rest in the right order and confirm when it’s done. With the 360 offer, the laptop follows the same path: delivered ready for a starter, wiped and reissued when someone leaves.
