Forum Discussion
Solved
Shared Mailbox can have a password and login enabled without license
I'm very much aware of the license requirements for Shared Mailboxes in Exchange Online and for all Shared Mailboxes we always give licensed users access to them. If we need to login to the actual sh...
This "feature" has been around for years, but despite probing Microsoft numerous times about it, we haven't received a clear answer. Until we do so, assume that it's unsupported, and that it breaks the license agreement.
Applications should still be able to access the mailbox via delegate/impersonation permissions.
You can actually access a shared mailbox without any workaround or license assignment etc.
Just delegate a licensed user with full access to that shared mailbox, configure the shared mailbox to an Outlook or mobile device and authenticate with the credentials of the licensed delegated user.
In my humble opinion, in that way you don't break any license agreement as the user that represents the shared mailbox stays in AD disabled and the user who accesses the mailbox is licensed and delegated.
Kind regards
Spikar
Just delegate a licensed user with full access to that shared mailbox, configure the shared mailbox to an Outlook or mobile device and authenticate with the credentials of the licensed delegated user.
In my humble opinion, in that way you don't break any license agreement as the user that represents the shared mailbox stays in AD disabled and the user who accesses the mailbox is licensed and delegated.
Kind regards
Spikar
This doesn't work for me. My iPhone sees my account on the phone already using "identical credentials."
- Nino_Bilic
Microsoft
Yeah this will not work; the real solution for this is coming, though, but it will be in Outlook Mobile:
- I have to correct me, that way of accessing a shared mailbox is not anymore possible.
Just worked for me, a horrid way to achieve something that should be possible by default.
So I have an Office 365 tenancy with four company domain names representing two arms of the company trading with different identities however the same shared staff.
So each staff member wants to read and reply but with different email profiles.
1) You cannot create a user called john@companyone.com and then a second user or shared mailbox with john@companytwo.com as "john@" has to be unique within the tenancy.
So the work around to that is create a second user/shared mailbox with john1@companyone.com and go into Exchange ? Shared Mailbox and add in the "john@companytwo.com" under SMTP and make that default and ignore the existence of john2@, you can delete it but Exchange keeps on putting it back.
The next problem is then wanting to create two email profiles, so each company can have its own branding applied. This is where the above trick works because Outlook signature profiles are a direct 1:1 link with accounts and if you're only signing into one account which either has all email going into one address or into the main address and an extra shared mailbox which is only shared with that user you only have one account.
So the above trick which I have just tried, worked and now allows me to login with a second account in Outlook and that in turn will allow me to create a second email signature.
What a hack for a limitation of Outlook. They just need to break the 1:1 link between Accounts and Signature profiles.
