Microsoft Releases View Another Mailbox for the New EAC

View Another Mailbox Allows Administrators to Access Settings for Mailboxes

Microsoft 365 message center notification MC720777 (published 28 Feb 2024) announces support for the View another mailbox option in the new Exchange admin center (EAC). Worldwide deployment of the View another mailbox option is expected to be complete in late March 2024.

This is not particularly exciting news as it’s simply a matter of adding functionality that exists in previous versions of the Exchange Online administration portal. It’s part of the work Microsoft needs to move functionality from the old EAC before they can turn off the old portal in mid-2024. Given that mail flow rules moved in November 2022, the process is taking forever. It’s almost as long as waiting for Microsoft to complete engineering for a new on-premises version of Exchange Server.

In most cases it’s easier and faster to update mailbox settings through PowerShell. The provision of a GUI option accommodates administrators who aren’t comfortable using PowerShell or don’t want to spin up a PowerShell session to update settings for a single mailbox.

Using View Another Mailbox

Access to the View another mailbox option is through the user details panel at the top right-hand corner of the EAC screen (Figure 1).

EAC then displays the set of mailboxes that the signed-in account can manage to allow the user to choose a target mailbox. The list (Figure 2) includes shared mailboxes, room mailboxes, and even a lingering team (site) mailbox. It would be nice if the list was sorted alphabetically (there’s no good reason why the Lotte Vetler mailbox is at the top). In addition, Microsoft should look at the “View site using another mailbox” heading. This makes sense in an odd sort of way because a browser accesses target mailbox settings, but “View other mailbox settings” would be better.

It would be nice if Microsoft had included some filtering capability to allow administrators to exclude objects such as room and equipment mailboxes. The fact is that the settings for these mailboxes are hardly ever changed after their initial creation. Being listed in the set of mailboxes only clutters up the list. It’s also evidence of sloppy development and testing by engineers who probably never use Exchange in anger.

It’s the Old Exchange Control Panel

Microsoft claims that the new feature is “modern, faster, and easier to use.” This is code for “we’ve created new screens that match the current design language for Microsoft 365 administrator portals.” The theory works until EAC displays mailbox settings in a new browser window when the full glory of the old Exchange Control Panel (ECP) is revealed (Figure 3). ECP first appeared in Exchange Server 2010, so its appearance is very familiar to generations of Exchange administrators.

The performance of the old ECP is not fast and I spent time waiting for ECP to fetch mailbox settings (Figure 4). Updating settings works as expected, but this experience is not modern nor faster as promised.

Further evidence of a lack of testing is in calendar settings where ECP displays an error message about a deprecated cmdlet (Figure 5). This is possibly because ECP calls the old Get-TxpUserSettings cmdlet to fetch information about creating events (like airline bookings) from inbound email.

The last time the Get-TxpUserSettings cmdlet featured in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook was the 2020 edition, so the obsolete status for the cmdlet is not new.

Another Brick in the EAC Wall

Microsoft is slowly completing the new EAC. Progress is not as quick as expected but they’ll get there in the end. In achieving that goal, it would be nice if the quality of what’s produced was better.

---

Learn how to exploit the data available to Microsoft 365 tenant administrators through the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We love figuring out how things work.