Overview of Shared Mailboxes

The Shared mailboxes module allows you to manage the shared mailboxes in your Nerdio environment. You can view a list of all shared mailboxes and perform critical tasks such as adding, editing and deleting shared mailboxes.

As described in this Microsoft article, "A shared mailbox is a mailbox that multiple users can use to read and send email messages. Shared mailboxes can also be used to provide a common calendar, allowing multiple users to schedule and view vacation time or work shifts." Shared mailboxes are different from Groups, although the two can be easily confused. A Group is a mailing list. A mailbox is not created for a Group. An email sent to a Group flows to all the Group members. A shared mailbox is a common account that is shared by a group of people. To access the mail sent to the shared mailbox they must open the shared mailbox in Outlook.

This screenshot highlights various areas of the module:

Manage shared mailboxes

Let's review the "Manage shared mailboxes" section, which is the main section on the page.

Title bar

In the title bar, you will see a "As of" date and time. Information about the mailboxes is loaded in to NAP and cached for performance purposes. The "As of" date & time tells you when the information was loaded in to NAP. The information is auto-refreshed when you add, edit or delete a mailbox. If you find the information has gone stale, you can click  the refresh icon to force NAP to load the latest information. It will take about a minute to two minutes to load the latest information. The module will be unavailable while the information is refreshed.

The search box allows you to search by shared mailbox name, email address or by member name. Place your cursor in the search box and start typing. The list will be immediately filtered to show matching results. Clear out the contents of the search box to remove the filter and see the entire list.

You can add a new mailbox by clicking the "add" icon. You can also add a new mailbox by clicking  the Add button that's available further down on the screen, after the list of shared mailboxes.

Shared mailbox management tasks

The management tasks section is where you see a list of tasks you or others have executed. For example, when you create a new mailbox, NAP adds a task to the tasks queue. Your request to create a mailbox typically takes a couple of minutes. You can view the progress of the task in this section. A task will go through these states:

1. Pending: This means the task has been added to the queue and is waiting to be picked up by NAP's back-end system
   
2. In process: This means the task has been picked up and is currently being processed by NAP's back-end system
3. Complete: This means the task has completed successfully
   OR
   Error: This means the task failed. This typically happens when the information was not entered right. Depending on your access level, you can click on the word "Error" to view detailed information about the cause of the error.