Best way to share contacts and have a shared mailbox?

[Bollard04]

Hello,

I want to achieve the following, and wonder if you could help:

1. A way that users can all have access to a shared mailbox (sales@company.com), where they can all send messages as sales@company.com and view the emails that are sent to that mailbox.

2. Setup a shared contacts folder, so everyone uses the same folder, one list that is always available.

What is the best (or recommended) ways to set this up? For 1. should i create a mail enabled public folder, or create a new user called Sales giving everyone permission to their mailbox or use SharePoint? Or what?

For 2. i notice SBS creates a CompanyName Contacts Public folder. Is that what i should be using? Or again something to do with SharePoint?

(By the way, can anyone tell me what the CompanyName Archive public folder is for? Does ALL the companies email get archived there?)

Thanks for any help.

Kind Regards

 

[1DMF]

The way we share company calendars and contacts is via the public folders.

Having a shared mailbox is all well and good, which can work fine on the internal network adding the mailbox to everyones outlook, however bare in mind that it will not work for those using Outlook Web Access (OMA) or Outlook Mobile Access (OMA).

Also not sure if it's fixed in Office 2007 but up until MSO2003 , the 'send on behalf of' doesn't work properly and so the sent mail even if highlighting the shared mailbox when 'new message' is clicked, will send the email from the persons main email account and not the shared mailbox.

By default SBS creates a shared company contacts in the public folders section, you can either use it or create your own and ignore/delete the default one.

Note: Ensure your backup software is capable of storing the public folder containers correctly, older versions of Computer Associates BrightStore ArcServe Backup did not correctly save the container types, so upon restore your contacts and calendars came back as email containers and all entries as recieved emails, completely corrupting the public folders!




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