In Office 365 you can create a Shared Mailbox, for several or all people to have access to. In this blog post I will describe how to create a Shared Mailbox using PowerShell. See my previous blog posts about connecting to Office 365 using PowerShell.
When the Shared Mailbox has been created, it is important to assign permissions to it.
In the following example, we will create a Shared Mailbox for IT Helpdesk.
New-Mailbox -Name “IT Helpdesk” -Alias it-helpdesk –Shared
For controlling access to the Shared Mailbox, it is easier control this using a Security Group. So create a Security Group, in this example we will call it “HelpdeskSharedGroup”. It is also possible to add a certain user directly. When a user has full rights directly, the mailbox will show up in the profile automatically as a second mailbox. Members of a security group will need to add the mailbox to their profile manually. This can be done in Account Settings – Account – More Settings.
Use the following command to add mailbox permissions to the shared mailbox created above:
Add-MailboxPermission “IT Helpdesk” -User HelpdeskSharedGroup -AccessRights FullAccess
Use the following command to add Send As rights to the shared mailbox created above:
Add-RecipientPermission “IT Helpdesk” –Trustee HelpdeskSharedGroup –AccessRights SendAs
Permissions and Send As right has now been added to the Shared Mailbox.
Create Shared Mailboxes with GUI-based Tool
The Office 365 product team has also released a GUI-based tool to make it easier to create and configure shared mailboxes. Before running the tool, you will still need to create a security group. The tool can create a shared mailbox and assign FullAccess and SendAs permissions to your security group.
Download the tool from Create Shared Mailboxes with GUI-based Tool.
Note: This tool only works with security groups, not user accounts. If you want to create a shared mailbox and assign it to a user, you need to use the PowerShell commands above.
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