Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 14 Jul 2021

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From YouTube: Shared mailboxes in Outlook

Description

In this 14-minute developer-focused demo, Juan Balmori and Ankush Oberoi relate how Shared Folders/Delegate Scenarios, was delivered in Microsoft Outlook JavaScript API v1.8. Any confusion you might have about Shared Mailboxes should be cleared up in this demo. Reviewed are: Shared Mailbox vs Delegate Access/Shared Folder, Shared Mailbox design considerations, availability of Shared Mailbox in Preview now for Windows and MAC, plus Add-ins in Shared Mailbox! After the overview a shared mailboxes demo is delivered. This PnP Community demo is taken from the Office Add-ins community call – July 2021, recorded on July 14, 2021.

Demo Presenters:
• Juan Balmori (Microsoft) | @juaneloBalmori
• Ankush Oberoi (Microsoft)

Supporting documents:
• Documentation - Add the shared mailbox to Outlook | https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/admin/email/create-a-shared-mailbox?view=o365-worldwide&preserve-view=true#add-the-shared-mailbox-to-outlook
• Support - Open and use a shared mailbox in Outlook | https://support.microsoft.com/office/open-and-use-a-shared-mailbox-in-outlook-d94a8e9e-21f1-4240-808b-de9c9c088afd?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
• Documentation - How to remove automapping for a shared mailbox in Outlook for Office 365 | https://docs.microsoft.com/outlook/troubleshoot/profiles-and-accounts/remove-automapping-for-shared-mailbox
• Documentation - Enable shared folders and shared mailbox scenarios in an Outlook add-in | https://docs.microsoft.com/office/dev/add-ins/outlook/delegate-access?tabs=windows

Stay connected:
• Twitter https://twitter.com/microsoft365dev
• YouTube https://aka.ms/M365DevYouTube
• Blog https://aka.ms/m365pnp/community/blog

A

Hello, everyone, thank you very much for coming to our community call uh this time around. I'm gonna be talking a little bit about shared mailboxes in outlook. First of all, I want to give you some context of this and why why I feel it's needed to have this conversation.

A

uh First of all, you know a long time ago, like two years ago in build and there was an ignite 2018. We actually announced the mailbox 1.8 release of the outlook, javascript api and, as part of that release, we announced support for shared folders back then in 1.8.

A

Basically, we were supporting. uh I think we were clear, but we didn't pass the message clearly to our community. What we claimed to support back then, was that we support uh shareholders and delegate or delegate scenarios. No, so some a few people understood that there were share mailbox support as well.

A

uh So the first thing that I want to clarify is that there are two different things in outlook uh very different, actually that uh that have similar names now, so one thing is to have a shared mailbox and another different things to have a shared folder.

A

uh Just for you who probably don't know about this difference, uh the share, basically a shared folder or a delegate access it's the scenario where someone wants to explicitly share access to his or her folders with someone else like, for example, I want to give access to somebody to be scaling. You know, appointments on my behalf.

A

All right I need to. I have an assistant, and I want to give him or her access to to my my personal mailbox right so that that's basically what we, what we are now supporting, uh very different scenario here is uh shared mailbox, so server mailbox are certainly locks that are set up by an admin and basically the typical scenario is. This: is multiple people accessing the same mailbox? Why?

A

Because you have probably a sales account at your organization, and you have a pool of people who are responding to the emails that that show up in that mailbox right. So it's very different, uh so share mailbox at that point we weren't supporting it, and so many people were trying it and we're not successful to some degree using it no or we're confused about. If we support it or not so today, I want to set the record straight on.

A

What's what we support and then you probably have good news for everybody here so well, certainly in the shared mailbox contest. Basically, what I'm going to tell you today is that we support shared mailboxes in preview starting today right and you can actually give it a try uh and when people create shared mailboxes and we we have with me- we've had talk with, probably with some of you in the call about this and with many customers.

A

uh There are a few design considerations, so the the typical way that you create a shared mailbox in exchange the admin goes and by default. What happens is that you create a shared mailbox in what we call an auto mapping mode and what that means is that, basically uh there you go so this is. uh I am right now in exchange administration in the new ui, and if you see in the groups category, I have a shared mailbox here. No, so this is where an uh an exchange administrator actually uh creates and configures shared mailboxes.

A

So if I go inside of this guy, I can see that you know the basics of the shared mailboxes, including who has access to it. What are the users that uh that I can actually include to access this shared mailbox?

A

And basically, when I, when I add members here what happens, is that by default it's auto mapping equals true, so basically, those users when they start outlook uh they're, basically just gonna, have access to the shared mailbox and it's gonna, be it's gonna, be looking like a separate mailbox uh in their outlook. Ui right, unfortunately, for whatever reason outlook is not loading right now for me for these profiles- and I cannot show you- I wouldn't want to show a demo here, but I I can't today, but it's basically just shows up now.

A

One downside of of auto mapping is that it uses the same size limit of the user's profile mailbox. So basically your your ost file that I think has a limit of around 50 gigabytes of memory. uh You know it the share mailbox space, it's going to be also eating from that size allocation. You have for your storage, so many people don't like this. No because usually shared mailboxes, I mean use, use a lot of space and they get a lot of communication here right.

A

So the alternative to this is is to to create a shared mailbox without the mapping faults, automapping turned uh off. So basically I mean there's kind of an obscure way to do this. uh There's no! It's not supported in the ui in exchange uh by the way. If you want to do it, I have a link here that that you can show you how to do it, but basically, uh and then the automapping is not going to work. So when you start outlook the automapping is, is not it's not going to work.

A

um I was going to show you here. As you can see, I have a shared mailbox here. Sales right- and it's just show up this- has the auto mapping option turned on and, as you can see, it just shows up in my list of mailboxes in outlook uh and again I bear with me because outlook is kind of buggy this morning, but this is a shared mailbox.

A

Okay, so when automapping is false, uh the user has to manually mount the mailbox, so it will not happen automatically when you start outlook, but you have to go follow a procedure. I sent a link here on how to create it now. The good news is that what we are announcing today on this call is that uh please try it so it's uh I think we we have uh kush within the call today uh help to validate that. You know the shared mailbox scenarios are working both for auto mapping or non-auto mapping cases.

A

So it's in preview right now. Okay, so we're declaring it in preview and the preview uh is gonna work for windows, uh online and mac, so give it a try and all the platforms uh you don't need any manifest changes.

A

So if you can recall here, it's important if you want your add-in to show up in the context of a shared mailbox, please make sure to include the support shared folder, manifest stack in order for your adding to show up in the shared mailbox, and the other thing that I that I, that it's uh you know as part of the shared folder feature that we shipped we provided you javascript api, that it's called get your properties async, where you can actually go and call it, and then uh you know get the permissions of uh you know, get information about the shared folder uh unshared mailbox.

A

Among other things, you can actually find out what types of permissions you have associated with this this mailbox and, of course, you can use the urls to make rest calls using the our rest apis all right so uh and then, finally, we still have a few known issues so mature mailboxes is they have a property that you can actually hide them in the global access list. So if you decide to hide the shared mailbox, then that add-ins are not going to be supported in that case.

A

So if the hidden, we don't support add-ins when the sharepoint share mailbox is hidden in the global access list. Basically the item is going to be low. That's one thing: that's a known issue, uh the second known issue, and it's not an issue really, but it's just for for your information. Is that there's another type of of of mailboxes that we know as group mailboxes.

A

Basically, when you create new groups and teams within outlook, we still don't support add-ins in that type of mailbox. So, and I see we have a few questions in the chat, uh ibt kun, uh how? How are you uh supports for? Yes, eventually, when addings, you know all the events are supposed to work, also in shared mailboxes.

A

Yes, henry we're using event driven now it's called with your mailbox yeah. You got my you got my my love there with that comment, uh but anyways just the idea is that you give it a try and if there are any so the call to action. Folks, please here is that uh let me see if I can do that demo later today, uh so please give a share mailbox. A try today.

A

uh Add the entry on the manifest, try it across platforms and if you find an issue we are at this point super interested in hearing about it. So please go to our issues in github and report an issue around this, and we will immediately engage with you and find out what what's going on um right. So, okay, so dustin is asking about old and all the new mac. Yes uh 1.8. uh The requirements 1.8 is supported in both the old and the new mac experiences.

A

So we will follow up with your comment that gets shared properties is undefined. uh Thank you for for mentioning that uh there you go okay, public folders next after groups gary. Thank you for asking that wait. Let's talk about it, I it's not in the backlog. Currently, this is what we have right now, but we can certainly take a look into that.

A

We can do the demo of the shared mailbox.

B

uh So yeah here, basically, I'm logged in as adele as a part of an organization, and here, on the left, hand, side. The sales and marketing is a shared mailbox that my admin created uh this the shared mailbox that was created has the default auto mapping set to true. So what that basically means is once I have been granted permissions to the shared mailbox after a couple of hours when the permissions trickle down as soon as I reboot outlook, this shared mailbox is automatically visible as an end user.

B

I didn't have to physically go into file options or what have you to add the shared mailbox?

B

um I also have script lab installed for my own profile, so here I'm currently looking at an email that was sent to me. So, as was the case with shared folders, if I go ahead, run the delegate sample from script lab and just do a simple get properties async, which is what this does. Is I get an error message that you need to try the sample on a shared item now.

B

Similarly, if I run the same test against an email on the shared mailbox that I was granted access to, since this is considered a shared item, as was the case with shared folders, I'm able to get the shared properties with who the owner of the item is.

B

What's the target rest url and the target mailbox that I need to point to in order to construct the rest url make the rest call if I want to have any rest apis, and here I'm going to run the whole operation, which would basically get a callback token with is rest marked as true construct the full url to get to this item id and return the whole item as an object secure.

B

As we can see, um this call completely succeeded, so in terms of functionality, it should behave the same way as shared folders has been supported up until now. That being said, one caveat, though, is for the case when auto mapping is off, the shared mailbox will not be automatically loaded in your mailbox.

B

The only supported way today in outlook to mount a shared mailbox is actually going into file your account settings. This is your main profile. You hit change, more settings advanced and add. This is where you will add a shared mailbox from if the auto mapping field was um set as false, when the shared mailbox was created by the admin one. Another thing that you can note is because this current shared mailbox that was added in my profile called sales and marketing was with auto mapping.

B

True, it does not show up in this dialog box for open these additional mailboxes.

B

What that means is, if I were to ever, go and remove this from my profile for say the reasons like juan pointed out that it's using too much space from my pst or what have you an admin intervention is required because I physically have no way to remove a shared mailbox for which the automation was said. As true, that is all there is to sharing my boxes.

A

Yeah, thank you very much. Hopefully folks, try it and let us know how it is working for you. That's it regarding share mailboxes. Thank you very much ankush for showing the demo all right. So that's basically what I have for you guys today. Thank you very much for for listening back to you, david cool. Thank you very much for that.