How to create a shared mailbox in exchange 2k?

[Avionicus]

Hi all, this is my first time to this forum.
Currently we are looking after two separate domains running Windows NT4.0, one of these domains was set up from the start with exchange 5.5, the other sadly was not. On the domain that has exchange 5.5 we use shared mailboxes for office cells ( ie i have ten office cells with ten people in each, easch person has their own mailbox and for each office cell we have a shared mailbox that each each user has access to to send and receive mail on behalf of the cell). Currently we have been directed from management to upgrade the domain with out exchange 5.5 to win2k, with ADS and exchange 2000. Our users are used to the shared mailbox concept and we would like to keep it on exchange 2k as well. My question is how do I go about doing this? The microsoft site isn't very helpful and any books I have come across for exchange 2000 doesn't address this issue either. Currently with exchange 5.5 we create a group for each office cell, with all the users of that cell assigned to that group, then we create a new mailbox only giving the group full access to this mailbox. I don't seem able to create just the mailbox in ads/exchange 2k without having to create a user first. Any ideas???????

 

[xmsre]

In E2K, you must have a user account for each mailbox. The "user" for a resource mailbox is typically disabled.

 

[Alabaster2100]

Avionicus, I've recently been down a similar road with 1 server 2 domains and some users that need an account in both domains. Here are the principals you will need to get this to work.

1. Create each user in the AD users and setup the exchange properties.
2. Create a User account for each cell. Login to exchange of each cell and give "send on be half of permissions" to everyone in the cell. (If someone knows how to give send privledges to a "group" with exchange options enabled please feel free to correct my logic)
3. On each users outlook go to the advanced account options and add their cell's account to the "also open these accounts" section. This will give each user 2 Personal folders, one for their account and one for the cell's account.
4. Show the from header field.
5. Train users that when sending mail from "the cell" to specifiy the cells account in the from field. Mail sent this away will appear as "from user x on behalf of cell 1"
* The other option is to setup 2 exchange accounts in outlook and when the user is sending mail, a new button will appear on the tool bar labeled "account". This is a drop down list of each of the connected accounts and will allow the user to select which account is sending the email. This is the route that I went with as it gave me a from of "useraccount@domain2.com" rather then the on behalf of. This also allowed me to set different signatures for each account.

Hope this is clear and does the job for you; as I said at the begining, if someone knows how to set "send on behalf" privledge for a "security group" then you can skip the account for each cell part and just setup a group for the cell, but I dont know if you can set this.

BoL
PA

 

[Avionicus]

Thanks guys, I'll try these ideas out!