Background.  Exchange 2007 installed August 2008.  We used a shared mailbox for our hotel staff. "Reservations".  The staff accessing this mailbox did NOT have their own mailbox.  I would create an EMAIL-Security-Group and add the staff to that group.

I would use the Add-MailboxPermission command and Add-ADPermission command to grant the EMAIL-Security-Group Full Access.

When we hired a new reservation agent I would create them in AD and add them to the EMAIL-Security-Group.  Then upon login to our server I would run Outlook for the first time and manually just specify the mail server and mailbox

mail.hotels.com

reservations@hotels.com and click "Check Name" and it would resolve and everything was great.  The user only had the shared mailbox in Outlook and did not have their own mailbox whatsoever.

Now we upgraded to Exchange 2013, all tests come back clean.  Outlook Anywhere is working, ActiveSync is working, PF were migrated etc etc.  Exchange 2007 decommissioned.

Now none of the users that had the shared mailbox setup in Outlook can open it anymore and I can not add any new users either. I get cannot resolve name, could not open folders etc.  I'll post pics if it helps.

I have searched high and low over google and tech net without any answers.

Remember I am trying to have users who do not have any mailbox of their own to be able to open a shared mailbox in Outlook as their ONLY configured mailbox in profiles.  Can someone please try this as I'm not sure if there is something wrong with my Exchange/AD setup or if this feature had been disabled, or if I have to use new powershell commands to tweak what I am doing.  I have been searching for answers now for almost 2 months so I figured I would post it.

Hi,

I understand you can't a shared mailbox when finishing Migration from 2007 to 2013.

Have you seen any error message left on outlook side?

Please try to create a new shared mailbox and check if you can access it correctly.

On outlook side,try to recreate a new profile to test.

Regards,

David 

• Edited by David Wang_Microsoft contingent staff 4 hours 51 minutes ago

Hi,

I understand you can't a shared mailbox when finishing Migration from 2007 to 2013.

Have you seen any error message left on outlook side?

Please try to create a new shared mailbox and check if you can access it correctly.

On outlook side,try to recreate a new profile to test.

Regards,

David 

• Edited by David Wang_Microsoft contingent staff, Moderator Monday, September 07, 2015 2:32 AM

Hi dpmamay,

The Shared Mailbox was it working post migration and suddenly stopped or its not working on Ex2013 at all.

If later did you lacked in proper testing before migrating users.

1. Anyways try the solutions given by David first.

2. Then run these in order. 

Firstly use this cmdlet to identify if you have any true shared mailbox or your current mailbox is a normal user mailbox used as a shared one.

#Find all -shared mailboxes
get-mailbox | ?{$_.IsShared -eq $True}

Get-Mailbox "Reservations" | ft Name,IsShared -auto

Check if the permissions are intact.

Get-MailboxPermission -Identity "Reservations" -User "EMAIL-Security-Group"

Assign permissions directly to user accounts and check.

*Also check if they can access the shared mailbox using OWA direcly, to bypass any Outlook Profile issues.

Make sure the username password are their individual accounts.

https://mail.hotels.com/owa/Reservations@hotels.com/?offline=disabled#path=/mail

If you get error, no mailbox, don't quit copy paste the link again on the browser and hit enter.

Now if you figureout there is permission issue, Use EMS to assign, you can't use EAC, it will not list non-mailbox users.(It will show once added though)

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity "Reservations" -User "JSmith" -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All

While configuring Outlook, enter the Name: Reservations and Email:  Reservations@hotels.com, keep the password blank. Hit Next.

I have tested this on direct user permissions assignment and it just works fine. Both OWA and Outlook.

Hi ,

By default shared mailbox user account will be in a disabled state so you cannot configure a shared mailbox directly in outlook with its credentials .

At the same time we cannot access the shared mailbox by supplying the credentials of normal user account in AD which doesn't have a exchange mailbox associated with it ,even though that particular user account is having the full access over that shared mailbox.

Fixed,"While configuring Outlook, enter the Name: Reservations and Email:  Reservations@hotels.com, keep the password blank. Hit Next."

it was simply Outlook discovery problem with how I was trying to setup a new profile.  Sorry I should have included more info.  Yes true shared mailboxes.  I had the users using OWA as a temp workaround.

My whole issue is that Outlook now performs auto discover and uses a GUID instead of server name now and when I was trying to add the shared mailbox as the user (that doesn't have their own mailbox) I was getting resolving issues.  

I was trying to setup the profile manually but found out as you stated to simply just enter the email address without ANY OTHER info and click next.  Auto discover does the rest and now it works.

Thanks for the help.

• Edited by dpmamay 10 hours 2 minutes ago

S.Nithyanadham your comment you made is actually incorrect.  I have over 100 users without any mailboxes of their own, just AD accounts.  They belong to a security group that has Full Access and Send-As rights to different shared mailboxes and they access it via Outlook or OWA.  It's a neat way to use Shared Mailboxes and now with the GUID problem solved I can continue using Outlook to view them :)

"At the same time we cannot access the shared mailbox by supplying the credentials of normal user account in AD which doesn't have a exchange mailbox associated with it ,even though that particular user account is having the full access over that shared mailbox."