One of the top support issues that we see at Office 365 support has to do with mailbox permissions; namely, Send-as, Send-on-behalf, and Full Control. Nearly all of these are about setting those permissions. In previous versions of Office 365, this wasn't the straightforward task one might expect; changing mailbox permissions required an administrator session in Remote Exchange PowerShell, running commands that looked like the following:
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity JeroenC -User 'Mark Steele' -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All -Automapping $false
Add-RecipientPermission "Help Desk" -AccessRights SendAs -Trustee "Ayla Kol"
Set-Mailbox –Identity “BobC” –GrantSendOnBehalfTo “JoeF”
It’s easy to see why administrators might get the syntax confused, and it doesn’t help that some on-premises Exchange documentation points one to the command Set-ADPermissions, which is fine for on-premises Exchange, but not so much for Office 365 Exchange Online!
In the current version of Office 365, administrators are no longer required to delve into PowerShell to change mailbox permissions. All three of these permissions are now easily accessible within the O365 Exchange Admin Console. To get there, follow these steps:
- Log into Office 365 as an administrator.
- In the Office 365 Portal, click Admin, and then Exchange.
- In the Exchange Admin Center, click Recipients, and then Mailboxes.
- Double-click the user whose permissions you want to modify.
- In the User Mailbox window, click delegation.
- Here, you have the option to add and remove delegates to and from the mailbox.
It’s as simple as that.
For the advanced administrators and power users out there, rest assured that the PowerShell methods of changing permissions still works as it did in previous versions of Office 365. When dealing with bulk lists of users, PowerShell is a far more efficient way to make changes.