Prior to the release of Exchange Server 2007 the concept of a resource mailbox was already well established.  Organisations had a need to make bookings for meeting rooms or equipment, and so the Exchange administrators created a user account and mailbox so that a calendar was available to manage the bookings.

Although this suited most organisations pretty well there were administrative overheads with this approach.  The calendars could not be easily managed by administrators without logging on to the mailbox to change certain settings.  Delegating management of the calendars to specific staff was also cumbersome.

Exchange Server 2007 Resource Mailboxes

With the release of Exchange Server 2007 resource mailboxes are much easier to create and manage.  Exchange Server 2007 introduced two types of resource mailbox:

Room Mailbox – These are intended for locations such as meeting rooms and training rooms.

Equipment Mailbox – These are intended for items such as pool cars, video projectors, or any other shared portable item.

Room Mailboxes

Most businesses have some kind of meeting room in their offices that needs to be booked for scheduled meetings.  The Exchange Server 2007 Room Mailbox is perfect for this task, providing a bookable calendar resource that people can add to meetings in Outlook.To create a Room Mailbox launch the New Mailbox wizard in the Exchange Management Console.

Here I am creating a mailbox for a new user account.

Fill out the user information fields.  You can record the password somewhere if you like, but you will likely never need to use it so any secure password you enter here is fine.

Choose a mailbox database to store the Room Mailbox.  Some organisations choose to have a specific mailbox database for resource mailboxes so that different storage quotas can be applied to them.

Complete the New Mailbox wizard.  You will now see the newly created mailbox in the list of recipients for the organisation.  Note that the recipient type is shown as Room Mailbox instead of User Mailbox.

You will also notice that Exchange has automatically disabled the user account for you, and set the password to never expire.  Prior to Exchange Server 2007 this had to be performed manually by the Exchange administrator.

A closer look at the properties of the Room Mailbox reveals an additional “Resource Information” tab.

You can use this tab to set properties such as the room capacity.  Here I have set the capacity to 12 seats.  Capacity is an informational attribute only, it does not prevent a person from inviting too many people to a meeting in a room without enough capacity.

To reduce the burden of managing bookings for a Room Mailbox you can set the mailbox calendar to automatically accept bookings.  This can be subject to certain conditions, such as only accepting bookings during certain times of day, whether or not to accept recurring bookings, and whether or not to allow conflicting bookings to be made.

To configure the Room Mailbox to automatically accept bookings use the following Exchange Management Shell command.

Set-MailboxCalendarSettings meetingroom1 -AutomateProcessing
 AutoAccept

Users within the organisation can now simply add the Room Mailbox to a meeting that they are organising in order to book that meeting room.

The Room Mailbox will accept the booking and update its calendar accordingly.

Other people making bookings for that room will now be able to see whether the room will be available at the time they wish to make their booking.

And all of this is achieved using built in functionality of Exchange Server 2007 without a lot of administrative overhead.

Part 2 of the series: Exchange Server 2007 Resource Mailboxes Part 2 – Equipment Mailboxes

Part 3 of the series: Exchange Server 2007 Resource Mailboxes Part 3 – Custom Resource Properties