Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox

Hello,

During holidays, or inventory, you often want to put an out of office on some orders or customer services shared mailboxes. From Outlook, you can setup your own out of office but not on a shared mailbox.

Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox – from OWA

You can do that from Outlook on the Web, if you have enough delegation on the target mailbox. It works for any kind of mailbox.

First, connect on OWA on https://outlook.office365.com, then click on your picture, and “Open another mailbox…” :

Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox – Open Shared Mailbox

Choose the mailbox to open :

Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox – Choose Shared Mailbox

Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox – Validate Shared Mailbox

Once the other mailbox opened, you can setup Out of Office :

Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox – Shared Mailbox OoF

Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox – Shared Mailbox OoF – details

Owa seems very similar between your own mailbox, and the one your opened, so, do differentiate them, you can check the URL, or the picture :

Shared Mailbox URL

Shared Mailbox Picture

Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox – from PowerShell

You can also do it from PowerShell if you are an Exchange Online Shell capable user. First, you need to connect to Exchange Online, then, you can use the Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration cmdlet that I showed in my blog post.

To use this cmdlet, you need some permission on Exchange Online, I detailed them in the blog post named above.

Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration -Identity  Shared@itfordummies.net -ExternalMessage 'You it a shared mailbox !' -InternalMessage 'You hit a shared mailbox !' -AutoReplyState Enabled

Enable Out of Office Shared Mailbox – PowerShell

Conclusion

Both methods works, one is more oriented end user, the other one is more IT support oriented. As always, PowerShell is more efficient, but IT support can also use the GUI if they are more comfortable with it.

Note : During my testing, some web browsers had some difficulties to open the other mailbox, but Internet Explorer from Windows 10 November update worked perfectly fine, I can’t vouch for the others.