Convert Office 365 Shared Mailbox to User Mailbox (2015)

Office 365 has been updated over and over in the past 24 months, unfortunately this means half of the tutorials ‘out there’ are out-of-date (including Microsoft’s own), I couldn’t find anything current pertaining to the very simple process of converting a Shared Mailbox to a User Mailbox.

You no longer need to use powershell (which is great as to me, the fact that Office 365 relied so heavily on powershell completely missed the point of why I wanted to outsource my exchange administration).

For all those admins managing a business in the cloud (or in the process of migrating), you could do worse than having a copy of ‘Office 365: Migrating and Managing Your Business in the Cloud‘ to hand.

Fortunately these days its a very easy process:

Ensure You Have A Spare License

Login to Office 365 and select ‘Admin’

In the admin menu on the left (which should have a heading of ‘Office 365 admin center’) scroll down to ‘Billing’ and click to expand it.

Click ‘Licences’ to see how many assigned licensed vs how many valid license you have.

If you need to buy another license for the shared mailbox, click ‘Subscriptions’ on the left menu and then ‘Change License Quantity’ on the right.

Convert the Mailbox

In the admin menu on the left (which should have a heading of ‘Office 365 admin center’) scroll down to ‘Admin’ and click to expand it.

Click on ‘Exchange’ and you should be taken to the ‘Exchange Admin Center’

On the dashboard, under the heading ‘Recipients’ click ‘Shared’

Highlight the Shared Mailbox you wish to convert to a standard/user mailbox and click ‘Convert’ on the right, you will be prompted with the following:

Once you click it you should see the following progress bar:

The process shouldn’t take long and will display a completion message like this:

Once completed, you need to return to the Office 365 portal, select ‘Users’ then ‘Active Users’

Highlight the newly converted mailbox and click ‘Assign License’ on the right to assign an Office 365 license to it.

You will then need to reset the password to retrieve a password for the mailbox.

All done!