SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I know it has been a while since I have posted to the blog personally.  Alas life has been busy after sorting out my presentation for SharePoint Saturday UK last December, then my Christmas break.  Now that I am back in the UK and have got back to work, normal service can resume.

As part of this busy time in my life, a number of changes have happened and I find myself setting up an Office 365 account for my partner to aid with her HR consulting business.  Office 365 was an obvious choice and the E1 plan seemed to be the most useful for the least per user cost in our situation.  It provides the following:

• SharePoint Online (Enterprise)
• Exchange Online
• Lync Online
• Public Website

Although I had setup an Office 365 P1 plan before with ghamson.sharepoint.com, it had no real purpose, therefore it has just kind of sat there being used as file storage for this blog + a few other things.

Now however, I have a real purpose.  My partner needs an online presence, a professional email address and it needs to be in a form that she is useful.

This blog post and probably the next series of blog posts will cover what I do to provide the setup my partner needs to run her business.  She doesn’t know SharePoint very well, has no idea what Exchange is really but has used Outlook and Lotus Notes for most of her professional life.

So without further a-do… Our first task after the initial setup is: Creating a shared mailbox:

• contact@oandhconsulting.com

So if you are used to On-Premise Exchange, this is a fairly simple task, so imagine my surprise when I found out that I needed to use PowerShell to create the mailbox and set the appropriate permissions.

Useful articles:

• Install the Office 365 PowerShell cmdlets: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-gb/office365-enterprises/hh124998.aspx
• Connect Windows PowerShell to the Exchange Online Service: http://help.outlook.com/140/cc952755.aspx
• Update your PowerShell script execution policy to Remote: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176949.aspx (by default, the script execution policy is set to: Restricted)
• Setting up a Shared Mailbox in Office 365 via PowerShell: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/Ee441202.aspx (please note that you need to have connected to the Exchange Online Service first and downloaded the cmdlets as outlined in the second link above (Connect Windows PowerShell to the Exchange Online Service).
• GUI Tool for Shared Mailbox setup: http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/exchange/1712.aspx 

Once you have done the initial mailbox setup, you can then assign a distribution / security group to allow access to the contact mailbox

These instructions are outlined here (also available in the link above):

Create a security group for the users who need access to the shared mailbox   In the Exchange Control Panel, create a security group for the staff who need access to the shared mailbox for Corporate Printing Services.

1. Select My Organization > Users & Groups > Distribution Groups > New.
2. Specify a display name, alias, and e-mail address. In this example, we’ll use Printing Services Staff,corpprintDG, and corpprintDG@contoso.com.
3. Select the Make this group a security group check box.
4. In the Ownership section, click Add to add an owner, if necessary.
5. In the Membership section, click Add.
6. In the Select Members page, select the users you want to add. When you are finished, click OK.
7. On the New Group page, click Save.
   Note   After you create a security group, the membership is closed. When membership is closed, only group owners can add members to the security group, or owners have to approve requests to join the group. Additionally, only group owners can remove members from the security group.

You can then run the final PowerShell commands to setup the access rights.

And apparently we are done, and in general we are.  However, my partner will not want to log into a separate mailbox to deal with the emails.  So I also setup a forwarding rule within the Exchange Online Administration interface to forward any email to go directly to her and myself.

Rule:

Sent to ‘O&H Consulting Contact Mailbox’

If the message…

Is sent to ‘contact@oandhconsulting.com’

Do the following…

Redirect the message to ‘<username>@oandhconsulting.com‘ and ‘<username>@oandhconsulting.com‘

For those interested in the total PowerShell script I used to achieve the above:

//Download the Office 365 PowerShell Cmdlets

Get-ExecutionPolicy

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

$LiveCred = Get-Credential

//You will be asked to sign in here

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session

//Exchange Online Cmdlets will download within the PowerShell command prompt.

New-Mailbox -Name "O&H Consulting Contact Mailbox" -Alias contact -Shared

Set-Mailbox contact -ProhibitSendReceiveQuota 5GB -ProhibitSendQuota 4.75GB -IssueWarningQuota 4.5GB

//Setup your distribution group in the interface

Add-MailboxPermission "O&H Consulting Contact Mailbox" -User contactDG -AccessRights FullAccess

Add-RecipientPermission "O&H Consulting Contact Mailbox" -Trustee contactDG -AccessRights SendAs

//Setup the forwarding rule in the interface