Tag Archives: Exchange

New Visio Stencils for Office 2013 Server Products

Leave a reply

Microsoft has made new Visio stencils available for Exchange 2013, Lync Server 2013, and SharePoint Server 2013.  Download links are below:

This stencil contains more than 300 icons to help you create visual representations of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Office 365 deployments including Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft Lync Server 2013, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013.  Download here.

This stencil contains Exchange 2013 specific icons to help you create visual representations of Microsoft Exchange 2013 deployments, including on-premises, hybrid, and Office 365. Download here.

SharePoint 2013 + Exchange 2013 = Site Mailboxes

2 Replies

When an organization deploys the new Office 365 or chooses to deploy SharePoint 2013 and Exchange 2013 on-premises they can use a new feature called a site mailbox.

A site mailbox is a shared Exchange mailbox that is associated with, and managed by a SharePoint site. A site mailbox provides teams a more integrated way to capture not only documents but also team communications.

Creating a new site mailbox is as easy as creating a list or document library.  Within the new SharePoint 2013 Site Contents section an option exists to add a new app.

All lists, libraries and other applications are now called “apps” within SharePoint 2013.  Clicking on the add an app option will present you with the standard SharePoint list and library templates along with any other additional applications that have been installed within the SharePoint environment.  One of the new applications is called a Site Mailbox.  Choosing this item will create an Exchange 2013 mailbox and associated it directly with your SharePoint site.

Once the mailbox is fully provisioned, which may take several minutes, any contributor on the SharePoint site will have access to the new shared mailbox.  When the provisioning of the mailbox is completed, each of the contributors on the site will receive an email message with information about the new site mailbox, including its email address.

After creation a link to the site mailbox will be automatically added to the quick launch navigation bar on the SharePoint site.  Clicking on the link will launch the site mailbox using the Outlook Web Application.  Contributors of the SharePoint site will be able to read, reply to, or create new email messages directly from the site mailbox.   Email messages that are sent using the site mailbox will be kept in the site mailboxes sent items folder, however, the from address will always be the user who sent the email and not the site mailbox address.

Site contributors that are running Outlook 2013 will automatically see the new mailbox show up in their Outlook client giving them quick access to both the site mailbox and the document library on the site.  Outlook provides that one single client access into both email content and documents stored within SharePoint.

In the image above, you can see that Karen B. has a primary mailbox in Outlook 2013 and a Northwind Traders site mailbox.  From that site mailbox she can quickly have access to both the emails and documents located on that site.  If Karen B. is removed from having contributor permissions on the SharePoint site, she would also lose access to the site mailbox.   As a result, the Northwind Traders mailbox shown in her Outlook 2013 client would also automatically be removed.

When the SharePoint site is deleted a process will ensure that the site mailbox is also deleted from Exchange.  If you choose to use a site mailbox you will want to think about both the data lifecycle for the SharePoint content and Exchange mailbox content.

The tighter integration of Exchange with SharePoint is providing new and exciting collaboration capabilities across the Microsoft productivity platform.  Learn more about Site Mailboxes on TechNet.

Exchange Online–Disable Connected Accounts

1 Reply

At a recent Office 365 overview presentation I was asked if there was a way to disable the connected accounts feature of Exchange Online.  Connected accounts enables a user to link other email accounts into their Exchange Online inbox so they can view and manage all of their email from a single location.   This can be a very useful feature but in some organizations the administrators may wish to avoid having other email (including from personal email accounts) from being mixed with official business email.

Exchange Online enables an organization’s administrator to create custom user role policies which can limit what features a person can use.  A Default Role Assignment Policy is created upon the provisioning of Exchange Online.  This policy enables all roles for a user and is the default policy assigned when you initially create new users. To remove the ability to create connected accounts a new user role policy will need to be created. 

  • Log into the Office 365 portal using an account that has permissions to manage the Exchange Online settings.
  • Go to the Roles & Auditing section and choose the User Roles option.
    image
  • Click on the New button and fill out the required policy name field.  You may also provide a description for your new policy.
  • Place check marks next to each of the roles you wish to enable for this policy.  To disable the connected accounts feature make sure you do not check the MyMailSubscription role.
  • Click on the Save button to save the new role assignment policy.

 

Now that you have a new policy it is time to assign it to a user:

  • In the Exchange Online admin portal, choose the User & Groups menu option.   You should now see a list of user mailboxes.
  • Select the user that you wish to modify and then click the details button.
  • Expand the Mailbox Settings group and select the new role assignment policy you just created.
    image
  • Click on the Save button to update the user’s settings.   The user now is unable to add connected email accounts.  

 

To verify that the policy is working as expected you will need to have the user log into the Outlook Web App and check their options.   In the options section with the account menu selected the user should see My Account and Connected Accounts.  

image

When the user clicks on Connect Accounts they should now only see the ability to forward their email to another address.

image

 

If the MyMailSubscription role is not disabled the user will see the ability to configure the connected accounts along with setting up email forwarding.

image