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.
Note
The Exchange Management Console 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'll typically want to use display names that clearly
identify the rooms' physical locations. For example, you might have
rooms named "Conference Room 28 on Fifth Floor" or "Building 83 Room
15."
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With equipment, you'll typically want 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. To make it easier to find rooms and
equipment, you should provide as much information as possible.
Specifically, you can make rooms easier for users to work with by using
these techniques:
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If a room has a conference or call-in phone, enter this phone number
as the business phone number on the Address And Phone tab of the
Mailbox Properties dialog box.
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Specify the location details in the Office text box on the Organization tab of the Mailbox Properties dialog box.
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Specify the room capacity in the Resource Capacity text box on the Resource Information tab of the Mailbox Properties dialog box.
The business 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, click New, and then select Meeting Request. Or press Ctrl+Shift+Q.
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In Outlook 2010, 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 e-mail
addresses, as appropriate. (See Figure 1.)
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Type the display name, Exchange alias, or e-mail address for any equipment you need to reserve.
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Click the Rooms button to the right of the Location text box. The Select Rooms dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 2.
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-click the room you want to use. This adds the room to the Rooms list. 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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Click Scheduling Assistant to view the free/busy data for the invited users and the selected resources.
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After you type a message to accompany the meeting request, click Send.
