Forum Discussion
Attempting to Create Shared Contact Groups
I have been working on this for 2-3 months now.
Objective:
Create a series of shared contact groups with some users read/write and some users read only. Note that all users are internal (part of the same Office 365 business community/domain).
First Try:
After reading some Microsoft articles, my first attempt was to create a shared mailbox. The permissions on the shared mailbox do not including read-only. After many attempts to try to get this to work, I called MS tech support who suggested that I use web Outlook to specify the permissions. After I did this, the read only users could not even see the shared mailbox. I reported this back to tech support but got no response.
Second Try:
This method involves creating a shared contact group by one of the 'owners' of the group, setting the permissions and sending out invites. Once again, I am having problems with the read-only users. When the owner attempts to send an invite to a read-only user, we get the error:
"Folder sharing is not available with the following entries because of permission settings on your network"
An article I read recommended sending the invite from web Outlook but web Outlook cannot even 'see' the contact group.
TIA
15 Replies
If you want read-only access, use Mailbox Folder level permissions, not Mailbox level. This applies to both shared mailboxes or user sharing his own contacts. And it's quite easy to automate via PowerShell and the Add-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet.
Thanks for the suggestion. When the advice from MS tech support did not work (recommended was to apply the permissions at the mailbox level), I also tried to apply the permissions at the mailbox folder level and that also did not work.
The issue with this experiment was that the read-only users could not 'see' the shared mailbox or the contact group within the shared mailbox
What people usually forget when adding folder-level permissions is that you need to add at least "FolderVisible" permissions on every folder in the path, including the root one ("top of information store").
rsmereka Shared mailboxes are useful if you do not want the sent to multiple mailboxes or you would like all replies to the messages to be from the same email address.
A distribution list on the other hand send emails addressed to it to the individual users' mailboxes. Users can be assigned permission to manage the list so they can add and remove members and you can manage who can send email to the distribution lists.
Another benefit of distribution list is that I believe there is a limit on the number of share mailboxes but not on the number of distribution lists as they use fewer system resources.
This link provides more information about distribution lists including how to add them in PowerShell. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients-in-exchange-online/manage-distribution-groups/manage-distribution-groups- Do you want a mailbox or just a distribution list to send to a group of users mailboxes?
Neither.
The shared mailbox was just one option (if it worked) to allow me to create a shared contact group. Distribution lists maybe an additional feature once the shared contact group with read-write and read-only users has been established.
