Exchange and Outlook use the term “Delegate” for another individual to whom you would like to grant access permissions to a part of your Exchange account. This could simply be because you would like an assistant to manage your contacts, calendar or email on your behalf. This post steps you through how to setup delegate access for the various parts of your account using Microsoft Outlook 2011. This document assumes you or someone on your behalf has already setup your account using the method directed by your Exchange administrator.
NOTE: At the time of this publishing, this functioned sporadically at best and indeed it is one of the few disappointments we’ve had while evaluating Outlook 2011. We found the most reliable way to setup Delegate access is to configure the delegate access by mapping the account to a Windows version of Outlook and then Configuring the delegate access from Outlook in Windows.
- Launch Outlook 2011 and select “Accounts” from the “Tools” menu.
- Select your Exchange account from the list and then click the “Advanced…” button in the bottom right corner of the “Accounts” window.
- Select the “Delegates” tab.
- Click the small “+” symbol (circled in red) below the “Delegates who can act on my behalf” field.
- The “Select User” dialog box will appear. Enter part of the name of the user (1) you would like to add as a delegate in the text field next to the “Find” button and then click the find button (2). At minimum (if the user exists on the Exchange server), the user’s name and email address should appear in the box below. Select the user you would like to make your delegate (3) and then click the “OK” button (4).
- After clicking “OK”, the “Permissions:” dialog box will appear. Select the permissions levels you would like the delegate to have for each of the elements of your mailbox. In our example, we are going to be granting John “Editor” privileges for Jane Doe’s Calendar. You can set whatever permissions level you would prefer your delegates to have. When you have made your selections, click the OK button.
- The name of the user to which you granted delegate rights, should now appear in the “Delegates” box. Click the “OK” button to close the “Delegate” panel and then close the Advanced options window.
- If everything worked correctly on the server side, then the user you have granted delegate access to should now be able to add your account as an account for which he or she is a delegate for and perform whatever functions to which you have granted them access. If for some reason, the user still can’t connect to your account as a delegate then Tech90 recommends deleting the delegation setup in this guide and follow the instructions here to configure delegate access from a Windows computer running Outlook 2007 or later.
