O365: Office Admins and shared mailbox usage (Why things needed to change)

Due to IT security concerns and brokerage procedural changes, C21 Affiliated has now made shared mailbox usage mandatory for all office admins.  The reasons for these changes are as follows:

• Human Resources requires a private way to communicate personal information to an individual office administrator – in the past, all personal information was communicated to the admin’s office mailbox, however, when an office administrator leaves their position, that personal information stays in the mailbox and can viewed by anyone with access to it. To keep personal and business emails separate, all office admins will have their own personal affiliated mailboxes for personal messages and shared mailboxes for all office communications.  To help maintain this separation of office mailings vs personal mailings, all the adminoffice mailboxes have been prohibited from auto-forwarding to their personal admin mailboxes.
• Office Buddies program is here! – to provide office administrator coverage between offices, brokerage and the C21 Affiliated Learning and Development department have implemented an Office Buddies program. Access to shared resources will be essential to the success of this program and shared mailboxes can be shared between individuals without the need for password sharing.  To ensure the success of this program, all the adminoffice mailboxes have been prohibited from auto-forwarding to their personal admin mailboxes, that way communications to the adminoffice mailboxes stay in one location so those with delegated access can see them.
• MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) is mandatory for staff! – due to national changes in data security laws, C21 Affiliated needs to comply with those laws, and with the frequency of poor security practices used by some employees, MFA has been instituted on all employee mailboxes (effective 06/15/2022). This means that employee mailboxes will be accessed as normal with username and password, and then require a secondary authentication method to verify and authorize sign-in.  This MFA will affect C21 Affiliated O365 access on all devices used to access O365 products (your affiliated mailbox, your OneDrive, and your Teams app) – so for office admins, you may need to periodically need to sign into your personal affiliated mailboxes before being able to reach the shared office mailbox.

To understand how to access shared mailboxes, please refer to this guide:  How to Access and Utilize Shared Mailboxes – Century 21 Affiliated: Help Desk (zendesk.com)

To understand how to setup MFA, please refer to this guide:  c21affiliated O365 MFA setup – Century 21 Affiliated: Help Desk (zendesk.com)