Chipmunk documentation
Departed-user Microsoft 365 archiving
25 pages · Product page on smikar.com
When someone leaves, their Microsoft 365 data creates a problem with two bad answers: keep paying for a licence to preserve it, or release the licence and lose the mailbox, files and chats you will be asked for months later. Microsoft enforces deletion timelines on unlicensed accounts, so "we will sort it out eventually" quietly becomes "it is gone".
Chipmunk removes the trade-off. It archives a departed user's Exchange Online mailbox (with attachments), OneDrive for Business files (with folder structure intact), and Microsoft Teams chats, channels and shared files - then the licence can be reclaimed.
Where the data goes. Into an Azure Blob Storage account in your own subscription, never into SmiKar infrastructure. It stays searchable and exportable indefinitely - no deletion timeline applies to it, and there is no reactivation fee to read your own records.
Getting it back. AI-assisted search runs across the archive, with granular restore for a single item or full-account recovery when an entire account needs to come back. This is what makes the archive answerable to an HR or legal request rather than merely stored.
Chipmunk deploys from the Azure Marketplace into your own subscription - search for Chipmunk there, then follow the setup documentation below.
Start here: Getting started for the overview, then Setup - which covers the app registration, storage account, certificate and DNS and first run. Restore and Search AI cover retrieving what you have archived.