Archiving Methodology in Office 365 Using a Shared Mailbox

This article covers an SOP scenario that can be adopted in an online exchange environment for archiving active mailboxes for future access. The benefit of this feature is the capability to control access to the archived mailbox and a money-saving tool (as shared mailboxes are free).

Prerequisites

The following is required to complete this task:

For Office365

• License- E3 or higher/Exchange Online Plan2 or above
• Your Global Administrator account

Convert Mailbox to Shared Mailbox (via exchange admin center)

1. Log in to your Microsoft 365 account. Go to Admin.

2. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, choose the Active users option.

3. Choose the user mailbox you want to convert to the shared mailbox. Click Mail Settings.

4. Then, click Convert to shared mailbox to convert your regular mailbox to a shared one.

5. Finally, click Convert to convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox.

6. Your mailbox has been converted to a shared mailbox.

Convert user mailbox via PowerShell:

Overview-

Here is the method of converting to shared mailbox via PowerShell

Prerequisites-

NonMFA exchange online

WithMFA

To convert mailbox to shared mailbox

Set-Mailbox -Identity <user mailbox name@domainname> -Type:Shared