Managing room mailboxes

The resource mailbox concept is not new in Exchange. Starting Exchange 2007, the concept of a room mailbox was introduced to allow users to book a meeting room, conference room, or training facility from their clients by inviting the room mailboxes in their meeting.

Let's create a room mailbox for the conference room on the first floor of Building 1. The mailbox will be located on Mailbox Database 1. The –Room parameter will define this mailbox as a Room Mailbox. The display name that users will see in the Global Address List is Building 1—Conference Room 1:

New-Mailbox -Database "Mailbox Database 1" -Name Bld1ConfRoom1 - -DisplayName "Building 1 - Conference Room 1" –Room

You can view the settings of an existing room mailbox using this:

Get-Mailbox –identity Bld1ConfRoom1 | Format-List Name, PrimarySMTPAddress, RecipientTypeDetails

If you have more than hundred room mailboxes in your organization, it will be easier to manage them by creating a room list. A room list is a specially flagged distribution used for managing rooms. For example, you may want to create a room list for all conference rooms with audio video conferencing equipment into one list and the rest into another list. This will help users to query the room list based on the usage of the equipment.

The following example will create a room list for all rooms with audio/video the conferencing equipment:

New-DistributionGroup -Name "AV Conference Rooms" -OrganizationalUnit "contoso.com/rooms" -RoomList

Now, let's add the Bld1ConfRoom1 room that we created earlier to the AV conference Rooms list:

Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "AV Conference Rooms" -Member Bld1ConfRoom1 @contoso.com

You can use the Set-DistributionGroup cmdlet to change any existing distribution group to a room list:

Set-DistributionGroup -Identity "No AV Conference Rooms" -RoomList

There are properties of room mailboxes that can be classified into three categories and based on the categories; different cmdlets are used to manage them:

• General: This includes information about resource mailbox such as Name, Email Address, Capacity, Mailbox Database, Alias, Department, Company, Custom Attributes, and Hide from the address list setting. The Get-User and Set-User cmdlets are used to view and change the settings in this section.
• Delegate: This includes settings that will define how the room handles reservation requests, such as whether the booking will be handled automatically, or a delegate has to manually approve or decline meeting requests. This section also allows you to add and remove delegates for your room mailboxes. The Set-Mailbox and Get-Mailbox cmdlets are used to change the mailbox related properties such as Mailbox Database, Email Address, and more.
• Booking Options: This section will allow administrators to configure settings for the booking policy. Some of these settings are as follows:
  • Allow repeat meetings
  • Allow scheduling only during working hours
  • Always decline if the end date is beyond this limit
  • Maximum booking lead time (days)
  • Maximum duration (hours)

The cmdlets used to manage the booking options section are Get-Calendar Processing and Set-Calendar Processing.

The following example will set the general properties such as Display Name, Email Addresses, and Resource Capacity for a particular conference room:

Set-Mailbox "Bld2 Conference Room 2" -DisplayName "AV Conf Room 2/2 (20)" -EmailAddresses SMTP:bld2conf2@contoso.com, smtp:bld2avconf2@contoso.com -ResourceCapacity 20

The following command will use the pipeline to get all the room mailboxes and set the maximum time to 480 minutes (8 hours) for which the room can be booked:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'RoomMailbox')} | Set-CalendarProcessing -ScheduleOnlyDuringWorkHours $true -MaximumDurationInMinutes 480

The following command will display the listed properties and their values for all the room mailboxes in your Exchange organization:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq 'RoomMailbox')} | Get-CalendarProcessing | | fl Identity,ScheduleOnlyDuringWorkHours,MaximumDurationInMinutes