I thought I’d share one of the scripts we use for automating creation of Shared Mailboxes within our organisation. One of the more laborious parts of creating shared mailboxes after creation of the actual Mailbox, is setting the manager, department, and granting a (possibly long) list of users permissions and send-as rights.

This script is a simple Powershell script that takes some of the pain out of the process. The assumption is that you want to achieve the following:

• Create a shared mailbox with a common alias, email address and username, checking input values before attempting to create the mailbox.
• You would like to specify the Department at creation and use the Department AD attribute to generate Address Lists
• You would like to attach a user as Manager for the Shared Mailbox so it is clear who manages it

You can use the script with Parameters – e.g:

.\New-SharedMailbox.ps1 -Department “Human Resources” -Alias hr_test -DisplayName “HR Test” -Manager managerusername -Usernames “username1,username2”

–Department is the text to use for the department attribute
–Alias is the Email Alias & Username
–DisplayName is the friendly textual name shown to users and recipients
–Manager is the username, UPN or email address of the Manager (who will have full access + send as rights along with being set as Manager)
–Usernames is a comma separated list of usernames of people who should also have full access and send-as rights.

Or – if that isn’t your thing, then you can just run the script without any options, and it will prompt you as you go along for the parameters. If you are using the Department attribute for Address List generation, you can hit enter when prompted for the department to get a list of in-use departments. As you go along values will be checked, to ensure the Alias and Display Name aren’t in use by Mailboxes or Mail Users and that the Manager and Usernames are attached to valid Mailboxes.

Before you get started with script it does need a little setup.

The setup is fairly straightforward, though. Open the script in a text editor, and change the values for $DomainController, $OU, $UPNDomain and $MailboxDatabase to values appropriate for your organisation. It goes without saying you should test this out on something not connected to your production environment. I won’t take any responsibility for any damage you do with this!

I’ve obviously taken some stuff out that is specific to our organisation (for example, we have a switch statement to determine the mailbox database and exchange server; and also generate Unix information) and if this almost does what you want let me know and I’ll be happy to help you customise it.

Download New-SharedMailbox.ps1