Office 365 Shared Mailboxes Not Displaying in Outlook

Question

I've seen loads of questions and answers from people wanting to switch auto-mapping off from shared mailboxes but I seem to have exactly the opposite problem.

I'm trialling Office 365 Business Premium for the company I work for and I've managed to get through everything so far without a hitch. I've set up users, the DNS records are all in place for all the Office 365 services, everything seems great. I've added users, I've added shared mailboxes, I've granted permissions to users on those shared mailboxes.

Now, according to this Office 365 article,

The shared mailbox is automatically available in the Folder pane in Outlook.

The only problem is... it isn't.

It can't be a permissions problem because if I access the OWA I can access the mailboxes using the given steps. I can also manually add the mailbox to Outlook by going the File -> Open -> Other User's Mailbox way.

So why does it not automatically map in Outlook (I'm trying in Outlook 2016 for Mac) and how can I get it to? There are quite a few users that will be using a number of shared mailboxes, I don't want to have to go around and manually add the mailboxes for each one.

Solution

Outlook for Mac does not support Auto-mapping. We need to open the share mailbox/folder in Outlook for Mac clients manually.

Besides, in Outlook 2007 and later Outlook for Windows, Autodiscover automatically maps to any mailbox for which a user has full access permissions. You can have a try with the Office clients for Windows. If other users are using Outlook for Windows, don't worry that they would see the auto-mapped shared mailbox in their Outlook profiles.

Comments

[Sera H]

D'oh! Since I would be deploying Office 365 in a predominantly Windows environment (in fact, I'm the only Mac user) I guess I should have tested on a Windows machine. Just done a test now and the auto-mapping does indeed work. I just wish that article stated that! Thanks for this!