I struggled with an office 365 mailbox issue in a Hybrid environment where a user had the Exchange Online Plan 2 license but received the error that we are preparing a mailbox for the user. I waited for 4 days and tried some steps but unfortunately none of them worked. I was able to fix the error and would like to discuss the same in this article.
I had accessed connect-msolservice module and ensured that no errors on the user account. The command that I used to check the status is below. It’s worth to clear any errors when troubleshooting the mailbox issues.
(Get-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName user@techieberry.com).errors[0].ErrorDetail.objecterrors.errorrecord.ErrorDescription
The command normally shows any errors on a user account from Azure AD. Thankfully, no errors on the affected mailbox. Also, verified that no email address conflicts and all seems to be ok.
I even tried the Redo-MsolProvisionUser command to see if it makes any difference but in vain. Redo-MsolProvisionUser retries the provisioning of a user object in Azure Active Directory.
I decided to try different steps and it worked.
- Go to “Exchange On-Premise“
- Access “Exchange Management Shell“
- Disable the affected mailbox.
Note: I strongly advise not to use remove-mailbox as they remove the AD account that is associated with a mailbox. It is recommended to use the disable command.
- I waited for the changes to replicate. After sync, the account had no mailbox in the cloud but it was listed in the soft-deleted which is normal.
- After that, enabled the on-premise object again using the Enable-Mailbox command.
Note: If no AD account available, the Enable-mailbox command will not work.
- After the sync is completed, initiated migration to Exchange Online from on-premise and assign a respective license.
- Guess what. After the migration is completed, we are preparing a mailbox for the user error is disappeared. Woohoo!!
Yes, we should move a data from a soft-deleted mailbox otherwise the user would kill me so performed mailbox restore request to the active mailbox.
To get more information, visit Microsoft website.
Want to improve your Exchange Online experience for better productivity? Check out the tips and tricks mentioned here.
Now I’d like to hear from you:
Did I Miss Anything? Or maybe you have a question about something that I covered.
Either way, I’d like to hear from you. So go ahead and leave a comment below.