Question for O365 users - Skype for Business/shared access

[Eric Weakland <eric () AMERICAN EDU>]

Greetings,

For those of you on Office 365 - have you run into this problem?

Student workers have no problem accessing "shared mailboxes" - think of it like a email alias for a front desk/admin 
role that we can delegate access to.  They actually don't log into the account, and we avoid having to manage a policy 
exception for it as they don't have to log into a "generic account"

We've run into a roadblock with Skype for Business - previously in Lotus Notes, we could enable delegated access to the 
chat program -  "Sametime" - so that student workers could access the chat functionality from their account - but with 
Skype we are being told that the only way to do it is to log into skype directly as the generic account.  This is going 
to happen a lot across the enterprise and we're not looking forward to managing all the policy exceptions (generic 
accounts have to have a business justification and signoff) and it also makes it almost impossible to trace abuse if it 
happens to a person.

Does anyone else have experience from dealing with this - how did you solve it in your organization.  If we had 
something like cyberarc/thycotic enabled, we could check out the credentials and track access - but we're not there yet.

Thanks in advance for any help/insight.

Eric Weakland, CISSP, CISM, CRISC, ITIL
Director, Information Security
Office of Information Technology
American University
eric at american.edu<http://american.edu>
202.885.2241

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