Getting Started: Onboarding

Welcome! Congratulations on choosing Emailgistics to supercharge your shared mailboxes.

In this document we’ll walk you through the process of setting up your account, activating your first shared mailbox, and adding your first users to that mailbox.

Setting up your Emailgistics account

Roles and Responsibilities

There are four different roles involved in setting up and managing an Emailgistics account. For many organizations, one person may fulfil ultiple roles, but in any case it is important to understand the different responsibilities of each:

Exchange Administrator

The Exchange Administrator is usually an individual in the IT team with global administrative access to the organization’s Office 365 server. This is needed to set up the appropriate access privileges and mailflow settings to ensure the Emailgistics service connects successfully to the Office 365 service. Once the mailbox is on board, the Exchange Administrator plays no part in the day to day management of Emailgistics.

System Administrator

The System Administrator is responsible for the ongoing management of the Emailgistics service from a technology perspective. The System Administrator can access functions to sync new users to a mailbox, to edit user privileges and update mailbox settings. This may be a senior Emailgistics user with appropriate privileges, or may be an individual in the IT team who is not a day-to-day Emailgistics user.

Mailbox Administrator

The Mailbox Administrator manages the day-to-day functionality of the Emailgistics service, and is typically a manager or supervisor within the team that will be using the mailbox. These tasks include running reports, configuring dashboards, creating rules, and managing users’ availability settings, if required.

Billing Administrator

The Billing Administrator is responsible for setting up and maintaining the payment details for Emailgistics once the trial period has expired. In some installations, this is a role reserved to the corporate finance department; in others, the Billing Administrator role is filled by a Mailbox or System Administrator. To add additional mailboxes to Emailgistics requires the Billing Adminstrator privilege.

Before starting

Emailgistics operates within the context of a Shared Mailbox in Office 365. If you currently use a distribution list to manage inbound shared email, this must first be converted to a shared mailbox (the members of the shared mailbox will be the same people as the subscribers to the distribution list). This is accomplished within the Office 365 environment: refer to your Office 365 documentation should you require guidance to accomplish this.

It’s also a good idea to check at this stage that your users’ Outlook accounts are not operating in “cached Exchange mode,” as this will prevent proper functioning of the Emailgistics folders. Make sure that the relevant checkbox is unchecked in the Account Settings dialog for each user’s Outlook account.

Once your shared mailbox is set up in Office 365, and the list of members of that mailbox reflects the users you would like to set up in Emailgistics, we can proceed.

Running the PowerShell script

Most of the work of onboarding Emailgistics is done for you through a PowerShell script. Microsoft Windows machines typically have PowerShell preinstalled; if not, it can be downloaded from Microsoft’s app store for your country.

As the PowerShell script runs, you will be required to enter several other pieces of information, which you will need to have prepared in advance. These include:

Credentials (user name and password) for Global Administrator access your Office 365 server.
Email address (and password if it already exists) of the shared mailbox you want to set up. Members of that shared mailbox will automatically become the users of the Emailgistics service
Corporate information: company name, address, contact information for administrative and support queries.

As soon as the script has finished running, you should see the new team folder structure in your Outlook or Webmail client. If not, closing and reopening Outlook will ensure that the team folder structure propagates to Outlook.

You may now navigate to the Emailgistics Administration portal to set up the mailflow rules for your new Emailgistics service. See our guide “Getting Started: Mailflow” for more details.