Convert O365 Group to Shared MB

[Corrin Meyer]

Is there a way to convert a O365 group to a shared mailbox; or at least move all of the emails/conversations from an O365 group to a shared mailbox?

I know that it is recommended to use O365 groups rather than shared mailboxes, however, until I can easily setup a way to automatically send "from" an O365 group, it is just easier to open up a shared mailbox from OWA and use that.

My use case is I want a "office@company.com" email address that I can assign to the office secretary and yet have the secretary have their own account.  This way, the person in the secretary position changes, I can just re-assign the "office@company.com" email and all of the associated information (contacts, calendar, etc).

[#2]

Nope and nope. You will have to create the Shared mailbox manually, then do the switch. There is limited support for drag&drop operations within OWA and your other option is to use EWS to copy/move the messages between the Group and any other object.

And yes, there are definitely situations where good old shared mailboxes work better than Groups, blindly recommending Groups for everything will result in issues later on. Unless Microsoft decides to bring more "mailbox" features to Groups in the future...

[#3]

Please forgive my total lack of knowledge; I am not an IT professional.

You mention there is a way to move/copy messages from the Group to the Shared Mailbox using EWS?  Is that Exchange Web Services?  Could you elaborate any on how I might use EWS?

The closest I have come to was to using PowerShell along with "Get-Mailbox" and "Search-Mailbox" to try and move/copy messages but that didn't seem to work; not all the messages seemed to get copied.

I have also tried using the Outlook desktop client and dragging from the group conversations to the Shared MB and I keep getting a "permissions" error.  I am the global admin so if I don't have permissions, it would seem that that is just not a supported feature?

[#4]

Drag & drop for Groups is currently only supported in the webmail (OWA).

EWS is indeed Exchange Web Services, an API that you can use to perform item-level operations on mailboxes. Many of the third-party migration products use it, but it's a code solution, not something you can run with a few clicks in the browser.

Search-Mailbox unfortunately doesn't work against Group mailboxes. eDiscovery does however, so it might also be an option - run a search against the Group mailbox and export the results to PST file, then import them into the shared mailbox.

[#5]

@Corrin Meyer 

Simple!

On your Microsoft Outlook desktop, copy the messages from the distribution group inbox to a local folder on your computer (.msg files).
Then open your shared emailbox on your Microsoft Outlook desktop and drag messages into the Inbox.
Ready, migration done.

[#6]

@Corrin Meyer 

A little late to the show but I do have another solution for anyone still looking. Although, a bit tedious but doable if the mailbox is not too large (or can be completed in multiple emails), what you can do is copy the emails in the group mailbox into a new email and leave it saved as draft. Then you have local access to all these emails.

Go to your Group mailbox.

Select the emails you wish to move.

Copy with ctrl+c command or right click the selected emails and choose copy from the dialog box.

Create a new email.

With the email body selected, paste with ctrl+v or right click the area and choose paste from the dialog box.

Once the emails are loaded, select one attachment from the new email.

Select all with ctrl+a.

Drag and drop to your inbox.

Delete the draft when done.

If you initially copy too many emails, you may crash the new email window. Force close/end task from the task manager and you can find the completed email in your drafts folder when back in Outlook.

[#7]

@MarVel_cellocciThis workaround was exactly what I was looking for.  I messed up and launched a M365 Group a while back having no idea it didn't perform anywhere close to a regular mailbox. 

I'm in the process of converting the whole thing to a standard shared mailbox and was struggling with moving everything.

This was just what I needed!  thanks.

[#8]

Hi - seems simple enough to create the shared mailbox and stop using the Group - but..... I want to use the same SMTP email address. So does that have an implication in scheduling the order of Shared Mailbox creation and subsequent Group deletion? Thanks.

[#9]

Hey Chris, how did you end up going about this? I am in the same boat. So far, copying the emails over from the M365 group to the Shared Mailbox has not worked. We also want to use the same name, but I guess I am going to fumble around with renames and aliases for now.