A service account provides an efficient way to connect multiple mailboxes to Ebsta. Mailbox management is undertaken by an Administrator, bypassing the need for users to manually add their mailbox and keep it connected every time they change their password. This makes adding new users easy and allows Admins and Managers to have confidence that all relevant data is in Ebsta.
Create an Office 365 service account
1. Go to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and sign into your Office 365 administrator account.
2. Click the App Launcher icon in the top left and click Admin.
3. Expand the Users menu on the left-hand side and select Active Users.
4. Click Add a User.
5. Enter the required information into the form. In the Password section, check 'Let me create the password' and uncheck 'Make this user change their password when they first sign in'.
6. Finally provide the user a licence.
7. Now you need to assign the Exchange permissions to your service account. Expand the Users menu on the left-hand side and select Exchange.
8. Click Permissions.
9. Click on the + icon to add a new role group.
10. Give the role group a name. Click on the + icon under Roles and add the role. Then click on the + icon under Members and add the user account you created earlier.
11. Click Save.
12. Now you can the option of limiting your service account with a specific Filter using a Write Scope Restriction. (optional steps).
12.1. You will need to connect to Exchange Online using a Powershell by following instructions at this article from Microsoft:
If you have MFA set, you will need to follow these instructions:
12.2. Once you have a working Exchange Powershell, you can configure your service account to impersonate the group of users you wish to connect to Ebsta by creating a management scope which defines the filter grouping the Exchange users.*
e.g. If all relevant mailboxes had the Department filterable property set as 'InsideSales' replace <RecipientFilter> with Department -eq 'InsideSales'
New-ManagementScope -Name:<DefineExchangeSyncScopeName> -RecipientRestrictionFilter:{<RecipientFilter>}
* You may need to wait at least 5 mins for the Exchange online propagation of the change.
12.3. Once you have created the management scope go back to the Exchange Admin Center and click Permissions. Find the new role that you created in step 10 from the list (in our example above it was 'User Impersonate' but you may have called it something different). and click the pencil icon to edit.
12.4. Select the new scope you created from the Write scope dropdown menu.
12.5. Click Save.
13. Once you have created your service account, you can test the connectivity and the scope at:
https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/
Once connectivity of your service account has been tested, you are ready to connect your service account to Ebsta and to connect your mailboxes. Follow instructions in this article:
Connect an Office 365 or Exchange Server service account & connect mailboxes to Ebsta