Create a Shared Mailbox in Office 365

A shared mailbox is accessible to many users to send emails and reply to the sender. It reduces the burden of incoming flow of emails like customer inquiries, help desk queries, departmental communication, complaints, etc. In Office 365, it is quite easy to create it in the Exchange Admin Center.

Let’s go through the simple procedure to create a shared mailbox

1. After successful login, go to Admin Center by clicking the Admin button.
2. Go to Shared Mailboxes option in Groups.
3. Click Add a mailbox button.
4. Enter a new name for the mailbox. The wizard will automatically choose the name as the email address. Finally, click the Add button. It will create a new Shared Mailbox.

Note – You can choose to edit the email address name if required.

5. After creating a new shared mailbox, it is time to add different users to this shared mailbox who will have the authority to send/receive emails using the mailbox. Click Add members to this mailbox button.
6. Click the Add members button.
7. Check multiple mailboxes which you want to associate with the shared mailbox. After selecting, click the Save button.
8. The wizard will display a message that shared mailbox members are successfully updated, and the changes will become live in up to 60 minutes. Click Close.
9. You can see the shared mailbox members in the list. Click Close.
10. The newly created shared mailbox gets added to the Shared mailboxes group.

Why is shared mailboxes necessary for businesses?

A shared mailbox has multiple benefits which directly enhances business communication –

• Timely response to the customer :– As multiple users can access a shared mailbox and reply to the sender, it helps the customer to get timely response. A timely response to the customer is highly crucial for to maintain customer satisfaction.
• Single contact point :– A shared mailbox becomes a single contact point for your customer to reach you. It is a direct way in which any customer can ask questions directly or gain some information about the business.
• Divided workload :– When a shared mailbox is accessible to multiple users, then its incoming emails are also shared among multiple users. It divides a heavy workload into multiple smaller tasks and employees can easily answer these emails providing the information asked by the user.

Drawbacks of shared mailboxes

A shared mailbox provides great flexibility to the business communication. But it also has some drawbacks which may create some problems if not handled properly –

• Chances of miscommunication :– When multiple people share an email-ID, then chances of miscommunication are very higher. The sender may get emails repeatedly because of miscommunication among the users of the shared mailbox.
• Loss of information :– Shared mailbox follows a one-to-many and many-to-one communication model, and it accelerates the speed of business communication. But it also increases the chances of data loss due to mishandling or negligence.

A shared mailbox is convenient for the businesses to divide the heavy inflow of emails and assign multiple users with the task of receiving and sending messages on behalf of the organization. To keep the data of shared mailboxes safe and secure you should constantly back up its content so that it can be restored when there is a data loss situation. The Kernel Office 365 Backup and restore tool is specially designed to keep the backup of Office 365 mailboxes in PST format and also to restore Office 365 data from PST.

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