Configure mailbox folder permissions

- [Instructor] Many times in an organization where there's an Exchange Server and Outlook users, a company may want to share certain inbox calendars, contacts, other types of items in Outlook with other users in the organization. And there's various reasons for that such as an executive assistant wanting to use and see the email of his or her boss in order to make sure that a lot of junky mail doesn't get through to the mailbox and waste the manager's time.

Another might be if you need to have a calendar shared so other people can see what you're doing that particular day, week, or month. So we're gonna look at this in three different places where we can set up sharing. We're gonna look at this in Outlook as you see right here. We're gonna look at it in the Outlook web access and we're going to look at it on the command line. Let's take John's email, for example, in Outlook. And we're gonna share John's email with Mary, simply by right clicking on the inbox and going to Properties and from here, we're gonna go to the Permissions tab.

And you can see that the default Anonymous, they're not going to have any kind of access to this email. Let's go ahead and click on the Add button to give permission to Mary to John's inbox. Make sure it's in the Add line at the bottom, and click OK. Now we have to change the permission level from None to the permission that we want. Now if we click the drop down, we can see you can make Mary the owner of his inbox and all the boxes get checked and the permissions get to All and Full.

As you go down the line and choose less permissions, you can see less boxes are checked and you can see that the left hand side changes as well. So, we're going to go ahead and give Publishing Editor rights, so that means Mary can do anything except for actually change the ownership and we'll click Apply and then we'll click OK. And we can do the same thing for the Sent Items, Deleted Items, the Calendar, all those different things in our Outlook client. Now if we want to give Mary full mailbox access to everything all at once, we would have to do that through the Exchange Admin Center.

And I'm gonna show you a little bit more about that when we get into the Admin Center and also do some PowerShell commands. Now, we're in the web browser version or Outlook web access and it works in a very similar way as the Outlook client. Let's take our inbox and right click and this time we'll choose Permissions rather than Properties. The same type of box pops up and from here we can choose to add a user. Put in the user's name. We'll just put in John.

Click Add and then, once again, give John the access that we want John to have, and then click OK. If we want to give access to the Calendar, let's just go ahead and click on the upper left hand side, and choose Calendar, and then right click on Calender and choose Permissions, and then we have the same type of option at that point. We'll now choose the Share with and we'll put in John.

And then click the Send option, and that'll send an email off to John, where John can then accept the sharing option. Back in John's Outlook, we see an email from the Administrator and we see that we'd now like to have the calendar shared from the Administrator to John, and we can now open this calendar. And on the right hand side we see Administrator.

If we would like to give full access to the Administrator mailbox or to any user mailbox, then we just go ahead and go into the Exchange Admin Center. Click on recipients on the left and mailboxes at the top, and then highlight the user that you would like to share, in this case we'll say Mary, and we'll click the Edit button. And then we'll choose the mailbox delegation, and then scroll to the bottom, and choose Full Access. Click on the plus, and then we'll give full access to the Administrator.

Click OK, and now the Administrator will be able to gain access to all of Mary's email and every single folder, and this also includes calendars and contacts as well. We are now in the Exchange PowerShell on our Exchange Server. And we've got a command open that is going to set a folder permission. And if we scroll to the left, we can see Add-MailboxFolderPermission is how we start and then it's followed by the identity of the source, which is going to be John and it's going to be the inbox.

The user's going to be Mary and it's going to be the AccessRights Owner. And after we hit Enter, we can see that it created a new session for implicit remoting of the Add-MailboxFolderPermission. The folder name is Inbox, the user is Mary, and the access rights are now Owner. Let's go back to John's Outlook and go to his Inbox, right click, and go to Properties, and go to Permissions, and we can see Mary is now the owner.

So that confirms that our command did work. So why would we want to use a command over just going into each person's Outlook? Well, if you have a lot of users, hundreds or thousands of users, it may take a long time to go into everyone's Outlook or Outlook web access to make those changes. And you can create a script that will do this for many different users, many different types of folders and mailboxes, inboxes, all those different types of things, all at once, which could be a big time saver.

By allowing users authorized access to other mailbox folders, a company can increase their efficiency by allowing work to be shared among many email users.