How to Create and Manage Shared Mailboxes in Office 365 Using PowerShell

Using PowerShell simplifies the process of creating, configuring, and managing these mailboxes efficiently, especially for IT admins handling multiple tasks. So let’s start the process of managing shared mailboxes in Office 365 by connecting to Exchange Online via PowerShell.

This command installs the required PowerShell module to manage Exchange Online. If it’s already installed, you can skip this step.

Install-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement

Now, you can import the installed module to make its functions available within the session

Import-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement

After importing the module, you can establishes a connection between your PowerShell session and Exchange Online.

Connect-ExchangeOnline

Make sure you use an account with the necessary administrative permissions to manage shared mailboxes. Once authenticated, you’re ready to execute commands to create and manage shared mailboxes.

To create a new shared mailbox, you can use the New-Mailbox command.

New-Mailbox -Shared -Name "Finance" -DisplayName "Finance Team" -Alias "Finance"

You can verify the creation of the shared mailbox in the Office 365 Exchange Admin Center. The new shared mailbox named “Finance Team” is listed under Manage mailboxes.

You can further configure the mailbox settings, such as mailbox delegation, access permissions, and email forwarding, directly from the dashboard. The mailbox is now ready for use by the team.

To grant FullAccess permissions to a specific user, such as “Claudia Darcy,” for the newly created shared mailbox:

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity "Finance" -User "Claudia Darcy" -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All

Now, the user “Claudia Darcy” can access and manage the shared mailbox. You can repeat this step for additional users if needed.

To grant SendAs permission to a user for the shared mailbox, you can use:

Add-RecipientPermission "Finance" -AccessRights SendAs -Trustee "Claudia Darcy" -Confirm:$false

To verify the permissions, navigate to the Delegation tab of the shared mailbox in the Exchange Admin Center.

To verify the “Full Access” permission via PowerShell, you can use the following command:

Get-MailboxPermission -Identity "Finance" | Where-Object {($_.IsInherited -eq $false) -and -not ($_.User -like "NT AUTHORITY\SELF")}

This verifies that the correct user has “Full Access” to the shared mailbox.

To give Send on behalf permissions, we use the cmdlet Set-Mailbox

NOTE: This will replace all existing users delegated Send on Behalf permissions
In this example, we give the user “Annie Smith” Send on behalf permissions to the Shared Mailbox “Finance” (using the alias Finance).

Set-Mailbox -Identity "Finance" -GrantSendOnBehalfTo "Annie Smith"

To add a user to the existing list of send on behalf permissions use this command.

Set-Mailbox -Identity "Finance" -GrantSendonBehalfTo @{Add="David Schuhmacher"}

In the above example, we add user “David Schuhmacher” to the existing list of Send on Behalf permissions to the Shared Mailbox “Finance”

In case you want to remove a user’s permissions on the shared mailbox, you should use the Remove-MailboxPermission cmdlet with the following syntax.

Remove-MailboxPermission -User "David Schuhmacher" -Identity "Finance" -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All -Confirm:$false

As you can see, using PowerShell simplifies the process of creating, configuring, and managing mailboxes efficiently, especially for IT admins handling multiple tasks.

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