Team email solutions with Exchange
Posted in Despite being an excellent product, Microsoft Exchange has some limitations when it comes to email management for teams. There are several approaches to implementing a team email delivery/management solution with an ‘out of the box’ Exchange deployment but unfortunately each solution has a drawback.
This topic has been on my mind a fair bit recently as we have been setting up team messaging solutions under a new company structure. In the past I’ve implemented custom form solutions to manage team messages so that all of the desired features are incorporated, however custom forms are not used by this company and they don’t wish to use them moving forward. With that in mind, we had to look at the default solutions and compare their behaviors before making recommendations to the various teams.
The following table illustrates the solutions that we offered to each team with the behavior of the replies to messages that are sent to the team. Interestingly enough, accessing a shared mailbox via OWA was often the best solution for customer service teams that wanted to be able to track their sent items.
| Solution | Default Reply Address | Sent Items | Singature |
| Distribution List | User’s Mailbox | User’s Mailbox | User’s Signature |
| Public Folder | User’s Mailbox | User’s Mailbox | User’s Signature |
| Shared Mailbox (attached to an Outlook Profile) |
Shared Mailbox | User’s Mailbox | User’s Signature |
| Shared Mailbox (accessed via Outlook Web Access) |
Shared Mailbox | Shared Mailbox | Shared Mailbox’s Signature |
