Single-Click Mailbox Conversion
Published Feb 06 2015 06:48 AM 40.3K Views

Update: If you need to perform the User > Shared mailbox conversion to preserve access to mailbox of employee that has left the company, we recommend that you follow the Remove a former employee from Office 365 article first, to properly disable access to the mailbox. Then - to preserve the mailbox, perform the conversion to Shared mailbox and reclaim the license.

Here’s a scenario that might be familiar to you: Sometimes, in support-focused organizations, the email account for external communications with customers is often managed by a single employee. When that employee transitions out of that role, mailbox management responsibility can be shared by multiple employees until a replacement is in place. To provide access to the mailbox for multiple employees, admins typically convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox. Previously, multiple PowerShell commands were required to convert and reconfigure a mailbox. As a result, admins have been asking for a simpler way to convert mailboxes.

Single-Click Conversions

Admins can now convert a cloud-based user mailbox to a shared mailbox with a single click in the Exchange Admin Center (EAC). No more needing to use PowerShell. Similarly, a cloud-based shared mailbox can be converted to user mailbox with a single click, as well. This feature applies to cloud-based mailboxes only. There are no plans for on-premises support at this time. Currently we support converting only between user mailboxes and shared mailboxes. Mailboxes placed on Hold, and personal archive mailboxes are also supported. There are no plans to support other types of mailboxes at this time.

Convert a User Mailbox to Shared Mailbox

As you can see from Figure 1 below, you simply navigate to the list of user mailboxes in EAC. Select the mailbox you want to change and click Convert. You will be notified when the conversion process has completed. image Figure 1 Converting user mailbox to shared mailbox

Convert a Shared Mailbox to User Mailbox

Similarly, as shown in Figure 2 below, you can navigate to shared mailboxes in EAC, select the mailbox you want to convert and click Convert. You will be notified when the conversion process has completed. image Figure 2 Converting shared mailbox to user mailbox Be sure to add a license for the converted user mailbox and assign it a temporary password before using it. A license is required if a shared mailbox exceeds its quota. This applies to any shared mailboxes that have been converted from user mailboxes. To manage mailbox licenses, see Assign or unassign licenses for Office 365 business. Paul Lo
11 Comments
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Glad to see this feature and saw it in some tenants back in December.


I do wonder, however, why this is not something that was ever included on the Office 365 Roadmap?

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I would like to cautious everyone before using the new “magic button”.

Once you convert mailbox, all email addresses are stripped from that mailbox.

Learned the hard way.

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Because On-Prem customers clearly never need to do this type of thing, right guys?
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Thanks for adding this functionality - in our experience, there is some additional work involved in keeping things consistent in a hybrid deployment. Specifically, converting the mailbox type in EXO does not write the updated attribute back to on-prem

(which is by design), but this leads to an inconsistency between the 2013 EAC and the O365 EAC until the on-prem object can be updated manually. The DirSync delta sync does not convert the cloud mailbox back to whatever it's set to on-prem, which is good,

but we presume running a full sync would likely overwrite it. Any thoughts on this?

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"There are no plans for on-premises support at this time."

"Mobile First, Cloud First Strategy"


Cloud Only Strategy thats called

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Do we still need to go in and set quota for shared mailbox or remove quota if converted to user? How about single click to convert to resource?
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Well, Satya himself basically said he wants on-premises Exchange to die.
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@ Mikael.Hagberg, wer83 and Glibglob: Well, this was always possible on-premises quite simply, but not so in O365. Please see

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj710164(v=exchg.150).aspx


@mitchelgw: I beleive you a referring to the fact that we used to require a license for a shared mailbox over 10GB, but that is not the case anymore: Shared Mailboxes now have the same 50GB quota as user mailboxes. Please refer to this, as it might vary on

the version etc.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exchange-online-limits.aspx#StorageLimits

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Awesome feature, introuduced in Exchange Online. It's a real help for all the Cloud Admin..
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when we convert shared mail box into regular mail box, will we loose data?
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Exchange admins should all be asking themselves how long before there's no on-premises support at all?
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‎Jul 01 2019 04:21 PM
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