Creating Exchange 2007 Shared mailbox Under SBS 2008 - Solved!

mailboxes-smallI’ve been banging my head against a brick wall recently with what should be a straightforward task.

I look after an SBS 2008 install and we are preparing to rationalise the email setup in the very near future by using Exchange 2007 that comes as part of SBS 2008

In preparation for that switchover I needed to create a shared mailbox for the “Admin” team. However, in SBS2008/Ex2k7 you can’t create a shared mailbox through the GUI’s, it can only be done by the Exchange Management shell (aka Powershell).

Not too much trouble I thought as I found a Powershell example, so I prepared my command:

New-Mailbox -Name:'Admin' -OrganizationalUnit:'lbc.local/Exchange resources' -Database:'Mailbox Database' -UserPrincipalName:'[email protected]' -Shared

But, this command kept failing: New-Mailbox : Active Directory operation failed on LBCSRV1.lbc.local. This error is not retriable. Additional information: Access is denied.

Active directory response: 00000005: SecErr: DSID-03152492, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0At line:1 char:12+ New-Mailbox

I was using the SBS / Exchange administrator account, and doing this command on the server itself. After some searching I found a few posts that were experiencing the same problem but no real solutions.

Then it hit me! I tried opening the Exchange Management Shell as Administrator (right-click - Run As Administrator) ….ran the command again and hey-presto…..one shared mailbox created!!! Woooohooo!!

“I will tame SBS…I will tame SBS” :-)

Two previous comments I received when my site was running Drupal:

Sabelo (not verified) - Tue, 17/08/2010 - 10:55

Thanks for your post it has saved me!! I have been battling with this error for solong and it never occured to me to do such a simple yet very important task. Thanks a lot once again.

David (not verified) - Wed, 02/05/2012 - 16:07

Legend, thanks for this. First result in Google and it fixed it.