Create Bulk Mailboxes in Exchange 2013 from CSV File

In this article, I am going to describe about how to create bulk mailboxes in Exchange 2013 Server. As you know, the requirement of New Exchange Server installation is one of the most required things when a Company wants to improve their work management strategy and want to do business in more managed way. So, After installation of Exchange server, Administrator needs to create user account mailboxes for every employees who is working in an organization or a company.

Scenario Related to Create Bulk Mailboxes

I am an Exchange Administrator, I have been hired in a company for Exchange Server Management. I have installed the new Exchange Server 2013 but for creation of user account mailboxes, I am thinking to create a list of users in CSV file, and then import that file into Exchange Server for bulk mailboxes creation. I am not sure, whether it is possible or not, and I am also curious whether this way of mailbox creation will be good or not.

In my organization I have recently installed new Exchange Server 2016. But right now there is Exchange 2010 already running. Therefore for the purpose of user mailbox migration, I have exported all mailboxes into several PST files. And now, I want to import all PST files data into new Exchange server 2016. Therefore for the purpose of importing the data, I have to create the new mailboxes first and then I would be able to import all user data into several mailboxes. But the problem is that there are more than 500 user mailboxes need to be created. Therefore creation of this amount to mailboxes one by one would take a long time as well as effort. So, I just want to know whether it is possible to create this amount of mailboxes at once or not.

Create CSV file for Bulk Exchange Mailbox Creation

In this section, we will see that how to create the list of all users and mailboxes in CSV file for creation of multiple mailboxes in Exchange server at once. It is not necessary to create this list in Comma Separated Values (CSV) file, you can create this list in Notepad as well. There are following columns required for mailbox creation:

After creation of user lists save it with the name of userdata.csv file.

Assigning the Password

Now, we will create the password for each user mailboxes, which will be same for each user because of saving the time in creation of different passwords for each user. But later on user can change the password according to their choice.

I will run a Command in powershell for this, in which the password would be assigned into a variable, and in next section we will use the assigned password variable for the time of mailbox creation. The desired command is mentioned below:

$password=Read-Host “Please Enter Password” –AsSecureString

After Execution of this command, it will ask for entering the password. Therefore, just enter the password and hit enter button to assign it into password variable.

Import CSV File and Create Mailboxes

After assigning the password into the variable run below mentioned command for importing all data from CSV file to create new user mailboxes.

Import-CSV userdata.csv | ForEach {New-Mailbox -Alias $_.alias -Name $_.name -userPrincipalName $_.UPN -Database “Mailbox Database Name” -OrganizationalUnit Users -Password $password}

After successful execution of above command in powershell would create bulk user mailboxes in Exchange server 2013/2016/2010. You can check the list of created mailboxes by going through EMC (Exchange Management Console) or by executing the powershell command.

Note: The above discussed case would be useful in case of newly installed Exchange Server in a company or organization. But in case of migration, after creation of all user mailboxes you have to import all data from PST file one by one into respective user mailboxes. For this you can use New-MailboxImport Command in Exchange 2013/2016/2010.

That’s all what you have to do to create bulk mailboxes in Exchange 2013 from CSV File.

Conclusion

This article describes all about how to create bulk mailboxes in Exchange 2013 from CSV file. There are some various scenarios discussed too for better understanding the multiple mailboxes creation requirements. Just three processes were required, which was CSV file creation, Assigning password into a variable and Execution of Import-CSV command.