How can I quickly configure multiple Exchange mailbox properties?

It can take five minutes for an Exchange administrator to go into the Exchange Administration Center or the Exchange Management Shell to review, change and recheck a recipient's mailbox setting. That might not sound like much, but imagine having to configure hundreds or thousands -- even tens of thousands -- of mailboxes? There just aren't enough hours in the day to tackle such a huge task.

Fortunately, Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 supports bulk editing which allows administrators to change properties for multiple recipient mailboxes simultaneously. The easiest approach to bulk editing is to select the desired user mailboxes from the list in the Exchange Administration Center. All of the properties that can be changed are displayed, and any changes to those properties are applied to all selected Exchange mailboxes.

The easiest approach to bulk editing is to select the desired user mailboxes from the list in the Exchange Administration Center.

It is typically not possible to bulk edit every available setting of the nine major Exchange mailbox properties -- you wouldn't want to make the same changes to a CEO's mailbox as you would to the mailbox of a warehouse manager, application developer, staff accountant or IT administrator. Instead, you're only able to bulk edit a subset of features and functions under each property.

Administrators can bulk edit contact information such as street address, city name and postal code, as well as internal company details such as department name, company name and manager name. Administrators can also bulk edit the 15 custom attributes available in general properties along with mailbox quota values, deleted item retention periods, and retention, role assignment and sharing policies. Bulk editing can also allow administrators to enable or disable connectivity options such as ActiveSync, POP3, IMAP, MAPI, Outlook access, or even enable or disable the archive mailbox. Administrators can move multiple selected Exchange mailboxes to other databases or alter delegate permission settings.