A scheduled PowerShell task that reads group membership and applies Full Access permissions. Usually written by someone who has since moved to a different team.
That’s a legitimate solution. We’ll say it plainly: if your script runs reliably and your environment is stable, you probably don’t need us. Here’s where scripts run out of road.
A script can set permissions. It cannot make the mailbox appear in Outlook when the permission comes from a group — that’s the Exchange limitation, and no amount of PowerShell changes it.
Most scripts work around this by writing direct permissions derived from group membership. That surfaces the mailbox, but your permission model isn’t really group-based any more. You’ve automated the maintenance of exactly the structure you were trying to avoid.
Full reconciliation runs get slow past a few hundred mailboxes. SharedConX operates incrementally, which is why it scales to environments with over 10,000 mailboxes.
A script logs what someone thought to log. An audit wants a complete, tamper-evident record of every permission change: who, when, why, triggered by what. Retrofitting that is usually more work than the original script took.
Scripts written by one person and understood by one person are an operational risk. When that person is on holiday, ill, or gone, the script keeps running until it doesn’t.
What happens when a mailbox has been moved, a group has been deleted, Exchange throttles, or the run is interrupted halfway? Production-grade error handling is the part almost no internal script covers.
| Custom script | SharedConX | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | None | GPB 1.80 / mailbox / month |
| Initial build | Days of internal effort | None |
| Ongoing maintenance | Yours | Included |
| True group-based automapping | Not possible | Yes |
| Audit-grade logging | Build it yourself | Included |
| Scale ceiling | Practical limits | 10,000+ mailboxes |
| Support | Internal | Vendor |
| Bus factor | Usually 1 | N/A |
An internal developer day realistically costs CHF 800–1,200 fully loaded. At 500 shared mailboxes, SharedConX is CHF 6,000 a year. Run the numbers. If you come out on the side of the script, that’s a good outcome — you’ll have made the decision deliberately instead of by default.