Office 365 – Creating mailboxes [EN]

I have read some pretty recent article, that you almost must still have an on-premises Exchange installation to manage mailboxes in Exchange Online after you have migrated to Office 365. I have also heard that in order to have a new shared mailbox, you have to first create a regular one and then convert it. Well, some of these things might worked this way in the past and some might be just a matter of convenience. But everything is much simpler now. Although, we are still in the Hybrid mode and some things might change once we finally get rid of our on-premises Exchange.

To create a shared or room mailbox you just do that – go to EAC (Exchange admin center in Office 365 portal), go to shared or resources and create a shared mailbox (assign an address and permissions for users who will use this shared mailbox) or a room. When saving new shared mailbox it shows me a warning that it failed to replicate it. But it actually creates it and you can open it via OWA pretty soon. It took 15-20 minutes for it to actually appear in Outlook of a user having permissions to it. Same goes for the rooms. It takes some time. Longer than with on-premises Exchange, but it eventually appears in Outlook.

What about creating mailboxes for new or returning users? Without Exchange ECP in a synced AD environment. Same as dealing with aliases (when changing last name), you have to go to user’s AD card, to Attributes tab and add SMTP address in the proxyAddress field (also add address into Email field in his/her AD card). Then wait for the user to sync to Azure AD and assign Exchange Online license to it (or any other license including email capability). Then it should create a mailbox in 5-10 minutes (check the mailboxes list in EAC).

As simple as that. I was prepared to deal with PowerShell a lot (i had to use it to make room calendar show actual names instead of just Busy status, but i had to do the same with Exchange 2013) or having to convert regular mailboxes to shared ones, etc. But it just works out of the box. For now.

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