Shared Mailbox Sent Items Changes Coming to Office 365

In Exchange Server 2010 there is a useful feature that allows an administrator to configure the sent items behavior for shared mailboxes. For example, this feature can be configured to automatically store emails sent from a shared mailbox in the Sent Items folder of the shared mailbox itself, rather than the Sent Items folder of the person who actually sent it.

This is quite important to some organizations and certainly makes it easier to find a sent item for a shared mailbox instead of needing to hunt down the sender using mailbox audit logging.

This sent items control is unfortunately not included with Exchange Server 2013 (but will be soon when CU9 is released), which also means it is not currently available in Exchange Online (Office 365). For several customers of mine this has actually been considered a reason not to upgrade to Exchange 2013 or migrate to Office 365.

The Office 365 public roadmap has good news for customers with “More control over Sent Items for Shared Mailboxes” currently in development and testing.

Emails can be sent as the shared mailbox itself or on behalf of it by members who have proper permissions. This change will allow newly created shared mailboxes to retain a copy of emails sent from the mailbox by default. You will no longer have to figure out which mailbox member sent an email as the shared mailbox or on behalf of it.

What isn’t clear from that brief statement is whether the feature will also be available for existing shared mailboxes, and whether the behavior will be configurable by administrators. The default behavior described above sounds fine to me, but enterprises love control.

There is no ETA for rolling out this feature to customers, but having it on the public roadmap is certainly a good sign for customers.

Update: this feature has been rolled out.