How to Delegate Microsoft Office 365 Form Ownership for a User Who Has Left Your Organization

When users from an organization move on to a new opportunity, the digital artifacts they created often still need preserved. One common example of this is content within OneDrive. It’s important to ensure that necessary content is archived prior to it being deleted. While OneDrive is a good example, there are obvious mechanisms in place to alert users to this change, so that this content doesn’t get missed or overlooked.

With Microsoft Forms, however, that process isn’t as intuitive, as any forms that have been created underneath an individual, instead of a Group, will cease to exist 30 days after the user is deleted. The long term solution towards this is to create forms within Groups, so that ownership isn’t tied to an individual, but if you do have a scenario where an individual who left your organization has Forms you’d like to retain, you can do so via the following steps:

1. Ensure you are logged into Office 365 as a global administrator of your organization
2. Verify the individual you are trying to transfer ownership from has been deleted or disabled in your tenant
3. You must execute this process within 30 days of account deletion to ensure the form(s) can be transferred
4. Visit the following url, substituting the email address with that of the user who has left your organization:
   https://forms.office.com/Pages/delegatepage.aspx?originalowner=email@yourdomain.com
5. Upon visiting the page, you’ll see all Forms this user is an owner of, and can click on the Ellipsis to move them to yourself or a Group (with Group being the preference, to avoid a similar situation in the future)

I found this helpful information on the Microsoft site but given it was something that took some digging to discover, I wanted to create a post and share this for anyone else encountering the same challenge.

Cheers,
Matt