How to set up email for a new employee

Setting up email for a new employee takes about ten minutes if you do it in the right order, and about a week of intermittent annoyance if you do not. The order is: create the account, assign a licence, set the display name and alias conventions to match everyone else, add group and shared mailbox memberships, enrol multi-factor authentication, then set up the device.

The step most often skipped is the naming convention. It sounds trivial until you have three variations of the same format in one company and an external contact cannot work out which address is real. Decide the pattern once, write it down, and apply it to everybody including the directors.

Four things get forgotten with reliable consistency. Distribution groups and shared mailboxes, which nobody remembers until the new starter asks why they are not getting the sales enquiries. Mobile setup, which is worth doing at the desk rather than leaving as an exercise. The email signature, which should come from a template rather than being retyped by each person. And multi-factor authentication, which is far easier to enrol on day one than to retrofit three months later when the person is busy.

Do the whole thing before their start date, not on it. A new starter spending their first morning watching somebody configure Outlook is a bad first impression of the business, and it is entirely avoidable with a day’s notice.

A note on shared logins. There is often pressure to give a new starter access to a shared account "just for now" because it is faster. It is faster, and it removes any ability to know who did what, and "just for now" tends to become the arrangement. Individual accounts with the right group memberships take the same ten minutes and do not have to be unpicked later.

The half of this that matters more is the leaver process, and it is the half that reliably gets skipped. When someone leaves: revoke access the same day, convert the mailbox to a shared one or archive it, set forwarding if it is needed, release the licence so you stop paying for it, and remove them from the groups. Businesses routinely discover during an audit that they are paying for four licences belonging to people who left, and, considerably worse, that those accounts still work.

If you are on a support plan, all of this should be included rather than charged per request. A per-ticket model makes you put off exactly the administrative tasks that carry the most risk when deferred.

• Hosting, Managed UK hosting for websites, email and applications, with backups, SSL, domains and DNS handled.
• Monthly Support Plans, Three plans with published prices, on-site included from £70 per user, and a coverage area measured in miles.