Giving Users Access to Multiple Mailboxes

It is very common in a lot of companies for users to require access to a common mailbox, for example your website may make reference to sales@exchangetrainer.com, and all the users in the sales department need access to this.

In Exchange 5.5 it was fairly simple to create a “group” mailbox, in Exchange 2000 it is not as simple, this is because a mailbox is an attribute of the object in AD.

This article is going to walk you through creating a group mailbox, and we will use the example of the sales@exchangetrainer.com.

So the first thing we need to do is create a user, that will in turn create the mailbox.

Using Active Directory Users and Computers, we shall create a user with the following information:

• First Name: Sales
• Last Name: Mailbox
• User Logon Name: salesmailbox
• Alias: salesmailbox

We shall edit the Email Address in Active Directory Users and Computers so it is sales@exchangetrainer.com, make sure you clear the checkbox “Automatically update e-mail address based on recipient policy”.

Now that was not hard was it?

So we must now alter the permissions on this mailbox so that members of the sales departments can add this mailbox to their Outlook client.

1.       Open Active Directory Users and Computers

2.       Go to the View menu and make sure the “Advanced Features” is checked, if this is not checked we will not see the “Exchange Advanced” tab on the users properties.

3.       Open the properties for the “Sales Mailbox”

4.       Click on the “Exchange Advanced” tab

5.       Click on the “Mailbox Rights” button, you will now be presented with the permission dialogue box.

6.       Add the relevant account or group (in our case Sales Department Group) and assign it “Full mailbox access”

We have now given members of the Sales Department group the ability to open the Sales Mailbox, the next step is to configure Outlook on the Sales Department users machine so that the Sales Mailbox appears.

1.       In Outlook, go to Tools > Services

2.       Highlight “Microsoft Exchange Server” and click on “Properties”

3.       In the “Mailboxes” section click on “Add”

4.       In the “Add Mailbox” dialogue box enter the alias of the mailbox you wish to open, and click OK.

5.       The alias you enter should be resolved to the actual mailbox name, and will now appear in the “Microsoft Exchange Server” dialogue box.

6.       Exit out of the “Microsoft Exchange Server” dialogue box.

What you should now see in Outlook, is the users original mailbox and the new sales mailbox listed.

You will have to perform the above steps for each user that will need access to the sales department mailbox.

One final step we must take to get this to work, when a user sends a piece of mail from the Sales Department Mailbox we want the From field to say it came from the sales department and not show the users actual name.

You will need to teach your users about this and make sure they follow the steps.

1. Compose a New message in Outlook on the users machine.
2. Go to the “View” Menu and make sure the “From Field” menu option is selected.
3. When the users compose an email they will need to select who they want the message to be addressed from, if they do not pick an address from the from field it will default to their name.

Well that pretty much wraps up this article and I hope you find it of use.

I would be interested in hearing from any of you what you would like to see covered in future articles.