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I'm currently working for a company that had an inefficient setup for their "department" mailboxes (i.e. mailboxes like info@company.com, queries@company.com, etc). I quickly realised that I can save the company a lot of money by simply using our Office 365 Exchange server's shared mailboxes for them and giving the relevant employees access to them. Basically, they used

The problem is, we're currently using GoDaddy (and the Exchange server that came with our domain and Office products) and if I wanted to remove the Office 365 license I'd have to delete the entire account, including the mailbox. I've been searching online for a solution that could quickly migrate a large quantity of user mailboxes to identically-named shared mailboxes, or at least make some sort of provisional temporary mailbox to move the mail there, delete the account and then remake it as a shared mailbox.

This would be extremely tedious to do one by one, there's currently around 40 department Office-licensed mailboxes, and with Exchange's slow speed it would take quite long to do. Is there any solution to simply "replace" a user mailbox with a shared one in Exchange so I can then kill the license in GoDaddy and retain data? Or does this need to be done by backing up the mails to alternative mailboxes, and then renaming them to the "correct" names?

Olivia Weston
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The user mailbox you're converting needs a license assigned to it before you convert it to a shared mailbox. Otherwise, you won't see the option to convert the mailbox. When you convert a user's mailbox to a shared mailbox, all of the existing email and calendar is retained. After converting the mailbox to a shared one, you can remove the license from the user's account.

Remove the license: On the Licenses and Apps tab, expand Licenses and uncheck the box for the license you want to remove.

Did you mean you cannot do this operation and have to delete the entire account? In this situation, you have to export the mailbox to PST files first , create new shared mailboxes, then import PST files.

How to export Office 365 mailboxes to PST. https://www.manageengine.com/ad-recovery-manager/how-to/how-to-export-office365-email-to-pst.html

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/39901cbd-b628-41a1-bb65-78e4e19e1f19/how-to-export-exchange-online-mailbox-to-pst-format?forum=onlineservicesexchange

Jayce
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  • Correct, I cannot do the license removal that way because of GoDaddy limitations. GoDaddy disables the classic Microsoft 365 admin panel and replaces it with their "lite" version. Thank you! – Olivia Weston Jul 14 '20 at 08:51
  • I am glad to know it is helpful. – Jayce Jul 15 '20 at 01:42