Configure Shared Mailboxes

Why shared mailboxes?

Office Calendars for Confluence was created with planning projects in mind. It's important, that a single project is not tied to any person in particular, because it's possible that someone leaves a company, or becomes ill. In Office, calendars are usually tied to a mailbox of a single user, which makes it quite difficult to manage the content. For this scenario, our calendar supports storing calendars in shared mailboxes.

When you add a shared mailbox in the admin panel, it will be possible to use this shared mailbox to create new calendars. This allows your users to create new calendars for a project on demand and have them stored in a central mailbox, with no ties to a single users mailbox.

How to create or add shared mailboxes

Please note: To use a shared mailbox this way, it needs certain permissions which you can't set via any UI - it's currently necessary to use Powershell commands. We are working on a more convenient, automated solution for this! In the meantime, please contact us in case you do not know how to create them.

To create a new mailbox, please use the code below and customize it to your needs (email address, etc). Afterwards, please add it in the "Shared Mailbox" section of the "Office Settings" menu in Confluence settings, using the email address.

# ----

# Please make sure to execute the following code in an elevated powershell session

# ----

#

# Check if we have the necessary execution policy set to execute remote signed scripts (from Office365)

Get-ExecutionPolicy

# If it's not Unrestricted, AllSigned or RemoteSigned, please do:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

# Start new Exchange powershell session with Office 365 - you'll need to be Office 365 administrator to do this

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

# Import all existing Cmdlets from Office 365

Import-PSSession $Session

# Create a new shared mailbox with the name "Confluence Calendars" and the alias "confluence"

# This will result in a new mailbox with the SMTP address confluence@yourdomain.com

New-Mailbox -Shared -Name "Confluence Calendars" -DisplayName "Confluence Calendars" -Alias confluence

# Give all users in your organisation (S-1-1-0) full access to the mailbox. If you want to limit the access to certain groups,

# it's also possible to provide a distribution group or single user for the -User parameter. To avoid having the shared mailbox

# added to Outlook automatically, please make sure to leave -AutoMapping on $false.

# See https://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/bb124097(v=exchg.160).aspx for more details

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity confluence -User S-1-1-0 -AccessRights FullAccess -AutoMapping $false -InheritanceType All