Exchange 2010 OWA - a few questions about using multiple mailboxes
- by Alexey Smolik
We have an Exchange 2010 SP2 deployment and we need that our users could access multiple mailboxes in OWA.
The problem is that a user (eg John Smith) needs to access not just somebody else's (eg Tom Anderson) mailboxes, but his OWN mailboxes, e.g. in different domains:
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc.
Of course it is preferable for the user to work with all of his mailboxes from a single window.
Such mailboxes can be added as multiple Exchange accounts in Outlook, that works almost fine. But in OWA, there are problems:
1) In the left pane - as I've learned - we can open only Inbox folders from other mailboxes. No way to view all folders like in Outlook?
2) With Send-As permissions set, when trying to send a message from another address, that message is saved in the Sent Items folder of the mailbox that is opened in OWA, and not in the mailbox the message is sent from. The same thing with the trash can. Is there a way to fix that?
Also, this problem exists in desktop Outlook when mailboxes are added automatically via the Auto Mapping feature, so that we need to turn it off and add the accounts manually. Is there a simpler workaround?
3) Okay, suppose we only open Inbox folders in the left pane. The problem is that the mailbox names shown there are formed from Display Name attributes. But those names are all identical! All the mailboxes are owned by John Smith, so they should be all named John Smith - so that letter recepient sees "John Smith" in the "from" field, no matter what mailbox it is sent from. Also, the user knows what's his name - no need to tell him. He wants to know what mailbox he works with.
So we need a way to either:
a) customize OWA to show mailbox email address instead of user Display Name, or
b) make Exchange use another attribute to put in the "from" field when sending letters
4) Okay, we can switch between mailboxes using "Open Other Mailbox" in the upper-right corner menu. But:
a) To select a mailbox we need to enter its name (or first letters). It there a way to show a list of links to mailboxes the user has full access to? Eg in the page header...
b) If we start entering the first letters, we see a popup list with possible mailboxes to be opened. But there are all mailboxes (apparently from GAL), not only mailboxes the user has permission to open! How to filter that popup list?
c) The same problem as in (3) with mailbox naming. We can see the opened mailbox email address ONLY in the page URL, which is insufficient for many users. In the left pane we see "John Smith" which is useless.
5) Each mailbox is tied with a separate user in AD. If one has several mailboxes, we need to have additional dummy AD accounts, create additional OUs to store them, etc. That's not very nice, is there any standartized, optimal way to build such a structure?
We would really appreciate any answers or additional info for any of these questions.
Thank you in advance.
