Shared info mailboxes on Office365
It’s been time since I wanted to write a post like this to help people understand and choose the mailbox to be used with information sharing in organizations with Office365.
Since the point is to be able to implement the most adequate option for managing info to be shared, I’ve decided to name it «Shared info mailboxes on Office365».
So let’s start enumerating the options we have and describe them as well:
- Distribution Groups (DG): although is not a mailbox as well, it’s an option totally valid and recommended to keep in front. These are addresses enabled for sending and receiving departmental messages, but enabling all those messages to be distributed to their members as let them to respond as the department and no as individuals. It has no cost and you can practically create as much DGs as you want to.
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Shared Mailboxes: this type of mailbox allows us to send and receive departmental messages (i.e: administration@contoso.com) working like a team on a separate space than the personal mailbox, without the need of an additional license (as long as you don’t exceed the 5Gb storage limit, if you want more then you must assign a license allowing you to get up to 25Gb). Of course the user will still need an individual Exchange Online license assigned in order to access this mailbox.
- Site Mailboxes: it’s like a shared mailbox, but the difference is the Platform where it resides, specifically in SharePoint Online so it can be viewed as a library inside the intranet portal keeping the attachments and Exchange Online for saving the body of the messages. This type of mailbox can be mail enabled in order to receive messages but doesn’t allows you to send messages as a departmental unit. It’s limit is 5Gb and needs no license to be assigned, but the user still needs an Exchange Online and a SharePoint Online license.
- Modern Public Folders: that’s it, «Modern». Due that Microsoft removed the public folders functionality of their online Platform and now they’ve implemented it, they’ve decided to do it using the Exchange 2013 technology with some performance improvements. This the of mailbox is maybe the most comfortable of the options when it has to do with large orgs because it has no hard limits on the number of concurrent connections to it. As same as the rest of the options, it doesn’t need no license to be assigned but of course the users that want to access them still need an Exchange Online license to be assigned. Its limit is awesome compared to the other options as it gives 25Gb per public folder mailbox and you can get up to 50 public folder mailboxes, that’s about 1,25Tb of free storage.
In order to make things easy for you, I’ve decided to make a comparison table of what I think are the most important things to keep in mind when making a decision over every situation:
It’s not a big thing but sure helps someone. Although I will be writing a single post for ever type of mailbox named here so I can show up how to configure them and tell the positive and negative things about them.
Until next one!
