How To

Automate Role-Driven Email Forwarding From a Shared Mailbox

Use Cases

Using a Shared Mailbox in Outlook should be a simple process; emails to the shared mailbox should automatically be forwarded to all of its members. Outlook’s email forwarding feature does not currently allow for that, but you can achieve it through the clever use of Distribution Lists (DL). This blog will show you how to automate role or profile-driven email forwarding from team-wide or department-wide shared mailboxes and turn a complicated issue into the easy process it was designed to be.

The Problem with Forwarding Emails from a Shared Mailbox

The idea behind a shared mailbox is that if an email is sent to the shared mailbox, everyone who is a member in the shared mailbox can see it. However, this needs every member to subscribe to the shared mailbox for them to see its inbox. Outlook has a feature to auto-forward emails from a shared mailbox, but it only supports one email address per shared mailbox.

Navigating this problem creates an inefficient process where it is not clear who has subscribed to the shared mailbox and can see the emails in it. First, an admin must create the mailbox and invite team members to join it. Every team member also needs to subscribe to the shared mailbox on their end and add it to their Outlook.

For example, our organization has a shared mailbox that our partnerships team uses to communicate with partner contacts through one email address. We struggled with this issue when creating our partnership team’s shared mailbox. However, we found a way to solve this problem and create a system that automatically forwards emails to every member of the shared mailbox, not just one.

How to Auto Forward Emails in Outlook from a Shared Mailbox

The secret to automatically forwarding emails from a shared mailbox to multiple email addresses is to use a distribution list (DL) as the address for shared mailbox email forwarding. This way, any emails sent to the shared mailbox will be automatically forwarded to every member of the DL.

Let’s revisit the example use case of our partnership team’s shared mailbox. To set up automatic email forwarding to our shared mailbox members, we created a new DL and added all three members to it.

Then, all we had to do was enter the new DL as the email for Outlook’s shared mailbox email forwarding. Now, whenever the shared mailbox receives an email, it is automatically forwarded to every member of the distribution list regardless of whether they have subscribed to it.

It’s easy to scale up this solution to work for more team members; simply add or remove email addresses from the DL to control whether they are forwarded emails from the shared mailbox. This solution also simplifies the setup process for a shared mailbox, so your Sysadmins no longer need to chase down every team member and make sure they subscribe to it.

How to Automate Distribution List and Shared Mailbox Membership Assignment

Especially in larger organizations with thousands of employees, there is a lot of manual work involved in creating DLs and assigning email addresses to them. That’s where the Hire2Retire identity lifecycle management solution helps, as illustrated in the image below:

Having created a DL and set it as the address for Outlook’s shared mailbox forwarding feature, Hire2Retire’s 100% no-code interface makes it easy to create custom rulesets for role-based DL assignments. Then, Hire2Retire will automatically assign and remove employees from the DL, and thus the shared mailbox.

Taking the above example of the shared mailbox for Partner Communication “RoboMQ Partner DL”, one would perform the following steps:

1. Create a DL that is configured as the forwarding email address for the shared mailbox.

2. Put a rule in Hire2Retire for role-based, rule-driven assignment (RBAC) that identifies who should be a member of the above distribution list (DL) based on their role (or entitlement) and/or attributes in their employee profile.

With this setup as and when a person joins the Partnership Relation department or meets the criteria of being a member of the above distribution list, she or he will automatically start getting communications without any configuration or manual work to be done. This zero-touch setup also takes care of adding new hires in that department to the forward (joiner), removing the forward when people change departments (mover) or leave the company (leaver).

Hire2Retire is the engine that drives this fully automated workflow and makes shared mailboxes as simple as they were originally meant to be. Now, our Sysadmins don’t need to waste any time managing memberships or chasing down employees to get them to subscribe to shared mailboxes. Our new hires are automatically added to all of the important shared mailboxes for their role from their very first day on the job. Then, when they change roles or get promoted, their memberships are automatically updated as well. The end-user experience is easy for our employees, and our HR and IT teams have tedious administrative tasks taken off their workload. It’s a win-win situation for everyone!

Automate Lifecycle Management and Access Control with Hire2Retire Integration Today!

This is just one of the business processes we designed Hire2Retire to automate for organizations, but it is far from the only process that Hire2Retire automates. Schedule a demo call with one of our experts today, and let’s show you how Hire2Retire can integrate your organization’s HR and ATS to your IdP to automate employee lifecycle management and provide a superior experience to your employees!

Bramh Gupta

Bramh Gupta is the founder and CEO of RoboMQ. He has a background in large scale real-time manufacturing systems, telecommunications and design and architecture of highly scalable and resilient enterprise systems. He is passionate about real-time integration and the value that it brings to business operations and critical decision making.

Bramh holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Business and Industrial Engineering degree from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur. Bramh combines his business insights and architectural skills to design and create highly scalable, integration platforms and tools that are needed to power the API economy.

Automate Role-Driven Email Forwarding From a Shared Mailbox

The Problem with Forwarding Emails from a Shared Mailbox

How to Auto Forward Emails in Outlook from a Shared Mailbox

How to Automate Distribution List and Shared Mailbox Membership Assignment

Automate Lifecycle Management and Access Control with Hire2Retire Integration Today!

Bramh Gupta

Bramh Gupta

+1 (800) 880-3714

sales@robomq.io

ATS

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