Continuing my predecessor’s efforts, in this post we are going to take a deeper look at resource mailboxes in Exchange 2010. These special purpose mailboxes are used for scheduling conference rooms, audio-visual equipment, bridge lines, loaner laptops, and any other resource that may be in broad demand and for which Outlook is a good choice to use for reserving the resource.

Meeting or conference rooms are a natural fit, since in the process of scheduling a meeting, most of the time you will need a place to hold the meeting. Extending this paradigm to other shared resources is a natural fit. When you want to use Exchange and Outlook to manage a shared resource, you create either a room mailbox, or an equipment mailbox using the EMC or EMS. This will create a disabled user account in Active Directory to represent the item. Then mailbox is used to hold calendar entries, and you populate the user object with attributes appropriate to the resource. For rooms, this can include the seating capacity, location, and whether or not there is a projector or display system. For other resources this may include details such as where to pick up the resource.

Continue reading Inside Exchange 2010: Resource Mailboxes

One of the beneficial features of Exchange server is the ability to create resource mailboxes. Resource mailboxes can be used for scheduling and booking resources such as meeting rooms, audio/video equipment, transportation, etc.

Resource mailboxes can be monitored from email clients such as Microsoft Outlook by creating and adding profiles to the existing client mailboxes. Or Administrators can add delegates to the resource mailboxes they wish to monitor. Either method allows the resource mailboxes to be monitored before an agent has processed the requests associated with those resource mailboxes. If the unprocessed requests are viewed from a preview pane then potential meetings can be inadvertently placed on the resource mailbox’s calendar prematurely. Administrators should avoid these actions as an agent will incur additional processing that would not normally have been needed.

Sometimes your end users may not be able to log on to a resource mailbox. Such errors can occur if they are trying to log on to mailboxes on Exchange server 2000 or 2003.

Another problem that can happen is not being able to move the resource mailbox. When you attempt to move the resource mailbox from one server to another server, or your end users are not able to logon to their mailbox, then the error messages may look similar to the following:

Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Resource Mailbox Problems

In part 1 of this series I introduced Exchange Server 2007 Resource Mailboxes and demonstrated how to create Room Mailboxes.  In part 2 of this series I went on to demonstrate how to create Equipment Mailboxes.  Now in part 3 of this series I’ll demonstrate creating custom resource properties for Resource Mailboxes.

What are Custom Resource Properties?

Custom resource properties are additional attributes that can be assigned to Room and Equipment mailboxes to indicate which features are available for those resources.

For example, in an organisation that has several meeting rooms with different features, custom resource properties can be used to show which room has teleconferencing equipment, which one has a whiteboard, which one has tea and coffee facilities, etc.

Similarly for Equipment mailboxes custom resource properties can indicate features such as which vehicles have a GPS installed, or what kind of vehicle (such as truck, van, car) it is. Continue reading Exchange Server 2007 Resource Mailboxes Part 3 – Custom Resource Properties

In my last post I explained the concept of resource mailboxes in Exchange Server 2007, and demonstrated the creation of a Room Mailbox for managing meeting room bookings.  In this post I will discuss the other type of resource mailbox – Equipment Mailboxes.

Equipment Mailboxes

Many businesses have tools or equipment that is provided by the company for staff to share and use for work related activities.  For example, a company might have a portable projector that sales staff can carry to client offices for demonstrations, or a pool car that is used by field technicians to get to remote locations.

In order to manage the allocation of these resources to staff an Equipment Mailbox with a calendar is created so that staff can book the resource using Outlook. Continue reading Exchange Server 2007 Resource Mailboxes Part 2 – Equipment Mailboxes

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. Continue reading Exchange Server 2007 Resource Mailboxes Part 1 – Room Mailboxes