Apologies that I had asked a similar question about 8 months back but never acted on it as at the time I didn't have the time to try the different solutions out and I don't actually think that any of them would have provided us with what we need.
Scenario:
Our head is leaving at easter. For the summer term, there will be a teacher acting as head. Then the new head will take over from the summer.
All our staff have their own personal login by name. They have Exchange mailboxes associated with these, most of them being internal only email addresses, but a limited number have external email addresses.
There are a number of roles within the school, head, bursar, registrar etc that have a role related email address. These are set as the primary email addresses for the users that undertake these roles, but they remain user mailboxes. These email addresses are use to send and receive email from/to the school.
We have a couple of other roles (office, info) which is used only to receive external emails. There is no pressing requirement to send email from these addresses other than to reply to or internally forward received emails. These are attached to a role based AD user and has no one person associated with it.
The role based email addresses are shared by different users who have share permissions setup to read and reply these role mailboxes, whether or not it is a personal mailbox (head, burser, registrar) or a non personal mailbox (office, info).
Requirement:
I would like to differentiate role based mailboxes from personal based mailboxes. So, for the change of head scenario, I would like to setup a mailbox for 'head' and give the current head full access to the mailbox and initially the acting head read access, then when the head leaves, give the acting head read write to the mailbox, then when the new head starts, give the new head full access. If I get this working for the head, I can then split out the other role based mailboxes into permsonal and roles.
Environment:
Windows Server 2008R2, Exchange 2010, Outlook 2003, 2007, option for 2010. We are licensed for 2010 on some machines but prefer initially to stick with Office 2007. Outlook 2010 is probably not an option on the new heads machine and the acting head will need Outlook 2003. OWA is also used.
Method in use so far:
Currently, everything works OK. It could be better, but it was one of those things that was low priority and as I give my time on a voluntary basis, I was not going to spend too much on if there was not a need for anything else.
We are currently using sharing from within Outlook but there are two issues that cause a problem meaning that it does not work as I would like:
- when accessing a role mailbox that is open on the mailbox list in outlook, there is no way of sending an email from this mailbox/role/user. If replying to an email, there is an option to select the 'from', but not when writing an email.
- if a user has multiple shared mailboxes open, there seems to be no way of setting a default mailbox such that all emails sent will go from the role based mailbox
Any suggestions please.
Hope this all makes sense.
Thanks
-Ian