How to Migrate Resource (Room & Equipment) Mailboxes to Office 365?

A business organization has many resources that are shareable between the employees and team members. Some of the shareable resources are the meeting room, conference room, seminar hall, company car, etc. The team members share such resources as per their requirements. Sometimes, two team members may need to access a resource for themselves, which creates an unwanted bottleneck situation.

Office 365 offers a resource mailbox in the form of room and equipment mailboxes that you can create for each of the conference rooms, meeting rooms, media devices, or company cars.

How to crate a resource mailbox?

Let’s go through the brief process to create a resource mailbox –

1. Log in to your Office 365 account and go to the Admin option.
2. Go to Exchange and let the Exchange Admin Center open.
3. Navigate to Recipients>>Resources.
4. Click New (+) icon, then Room Mailbox or Equipment mailbox. Make your selection.
5. Input the details for either Room Mailbox or Equipment mailbox and create a new resource mailbox.

Once you have created the resource (room & equipment) mailbox, then everyone in the organization can book it for their purposes.

Resource mailbox(es) such as room and equipment are associated with an Active Directory account which is in disabled mode. If you want to migrate any resource mailbox to Office 365, then you must be aware that there is no direct mechanism for such migration.

But you can alter some changes in the Active Directory to make them available for migration. If you enable the resource mailbox in the active directory, then it will become visible in any migration method.

How to enable a resource mailbox in Active Directory

By default, the Resource mailboxes are put in disabled mode in active directory. So, you need to enable them first. Here is its brief procedure –

1. Go to you Domain Controller and open Active Directory Users and Computers option.
2. Select the Users folder.
3. Choose your room or equipment mailbox, right-click it and click properties.
4. Under Properties window, go to Account tab and uncheck the Account is disabled option. Finally, click Apply button.
5. Click OK and close the wizard.
6. Perform the same procedure for each resource mailbox you want to migrate.

Connection to Exchange Online using PowerShell

1. Run Windows PowerShell as an Administrator.
2. Run the following command –
   $UserCredential = Get-Credential
3. A sign-in prompt will open, and you need to input Exchange Online user credentials.
4. Run the following command –
   $SESSION = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
5. Import-PSSession $SESSION
6. Connect-MsolService -Credential $UserCredential

Now your Exchange Online is connected to the Office 365.

Start Migration

To initiate a migration, run the following command –

Migration is started.

Monitoring of migration

To monitor the ongoing migration, run following command

Remove move request

After a successful migration, you need to remove the move request. Run the following command –

Final Statement

While the Windows Powershell provides complete steps to migrate Room mailbox to Office 365, you will find it hard to follow the procedure as it needs some changes in the Active Directory. So, only a root user of Active Directory will be able to enable the resource mailbox. If you do not have access to active directory, then you will not be able to complete the room mailbox to Office 365 migration. To get the desired job done, you need the assistance from a competent professional tool which can access the room mailbox and migrate it to Office 365. Exchange Migrator – Express Edition is a light-weight Exchange migration tool which can access the room mailbox and migrate it directly to Office 365 account. It completes the process in minimum steps and provides appropriate filters to select the desired item for migration.