Exchange Server 2013 and Exchange Online make it easy to create several special-purpose mailbox types, including the following:
The sections that follow discuss techniques for working with these special-purpose mailboxes.
1. Using room and equipment mailboxes
You use room and equipment mailboxes for scheduling purposes only. You’ll find that:
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Room mailboxes are useful when you have conference rooms, training
rooms, and other rooms for which you need to coordinate the use.
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Equipment mailboxes are useful when you have projectors, media
carts, or other items of equipment for which you need to coordinate the
use. Every room and equipment mailbox must have a separate user account
associated with it. Although these accounts are required so that the
mailboxes can be used for scheduling, the accounts are disabled by
default so that they cannot be used for logon. To ensure that the
resource accounts do not get enabled accidentally, you need to
coordinate closely with other administrators in your organization.
Important
Each room or piece of equipment must have a separate user account.
This is necessary to track the unique free/busy data for each resource.
Note
Exchange Admin Center doesn’t show the enabled or disabled status of
user accounts. The only way to check the status is to use domain
administration tools.
Because the number of scheduled rooms and amount of equipment grows
as your organization grows, you’ll want to carefully consider the
naming conventions you use with rooms and equipment:
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With rooms, you may want to use display names that clearly identify
the rooms’ physical locations. For example, you might have rooms named
“Conference Room B on Fifth Floor” or “Building 83 Room 15.”
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With
equipment, you may want the display name to identify the type of
equipment, the equipment’s characteristics, and the equipment’s
relative location. For example, you might have equipment named “NEC HD
Projector at Seattle Office” or “Fifth Floor Media Cart.”
As with standard user mailboxes, room and equipment mailboxes have contact information associated with them (see Figure 1).
To make it easier to find rooms and equipment, you should provide as
much information as possible. If a room has a conference or call-in
phone, be sure to provide this phone number. Also, provide location
details that help people find the conference room and specify the room
capacity. The phone, location, and capacity are displayed in Microsoft
Office Outlook.
After you’ve set up mailboxes for your rooms and equipment,
scheduling the rooms and equipment is straightforward. In Exchange,
room and equipment availability is tracked using free/busy data. In
Outlook, a user who wants to reserve rooms, equipment, or both simply
makes a meeting request that includes the rooms and equipment that are
required for the meeting.
The steps to schedule a meeting and reserve equipment are as follows:
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Create a meeting request:
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In Outlook 2007, tap or click New, and then select Meeting Request. Or press Ctrl+Shift+Q.
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In Outlook 2010 or Outlook 2013, tap or click New Items, and then select Meeting. Or press Ctrl+Shift+Q.
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In the To text box, invite the individuals who should attend the
meeting by typing their display names, Exchange aliases, or email
addresses, as appropriate (see Figure 2).
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Type the display name, Exchange alias, or email address for any equipment you need to reserve.
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Tap or click Rooms to the right of the Location text box. The Select Rooms dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 7-3.
By default, the Select Rooms dialog box uses the All Rooms address
book. Rooms are added to this address book automatically when you
create them.
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Double-tap or double-click the room you’d like to use. This adds the
room to the Rooms list. Tap or click OK to close the Select Rooms
dialog box.
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In the Subject text box, type the meeting subject.
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Use the Start Time and End Time options to schedule the start and end times for the meeting.
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Tap or click Scheduling Assistant to view the free/busy data for the
invited users and the selected resources. Use the free/busy data to
make changes if necessary.
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Type a message to accompany the meeting request, then tap or click Send.
Exchange can be configured to accept booking requests automatically,
based on availability, or to route requests through delegates, such as
office administrators, who review requests. Although small
organizations might not need coordinators for rooms and equipment, most
large organizations will need coordinators to prevent conflicts.
Both on-premises Exchange and Exchange Online provide additional booking options that can help to reduce conflicts (see Figure 4). The booking options are the same for both rooms and equipment. The options allow you to:
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Specify whether repeat bookings are allowed. By default, repeat
bookings are allowed. If you disable the related settings, users won’t
be able to schedule repeating meetings.
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Specify whether the room or equipment can be scheduled only during
working hours. By default, this option is disabled, which allows rooms
and equipment to be scheduled for use at any time. The standard working
hours are defined as 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Monday through Friday but
can be changed using the Calendaring options in Outlook.
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Specify the maximum number of days in advance the room or equipment
can be booked. By default, rooms and equipment can be booked up to 180
days in advance. You can change the default to any value from 0 to
1080. A value of 0 removes the lead time restriction completely.
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Specify the maximum duration that the room or equipment can be
reserved. By default, rooms and equipment can be reserved for up to 24
hours, which allows for preparation and maintenance that may be
required. You can change the default to any value from 0 to 35791394.1.
A value of 0 removes the duration restriction completely.
You can
configure booking options after you create the room or equipment
mailbox. In Exchange Admin Center, navigate to Recipients >
Resources and then double-tap or double-click the resource you want to
configure. Next, in the properties dialog box for the resource, select
Booking Options. After you change the booking options, tap or click
Save to apply the changes.
