|
Scheduling Resources
Exchange makes it easy to schedule
resources such as conference rooms.
As always seems to be the case, there
are several different ways to accomplish the same thing.
This page will provide instructions for each of the two
primary alternatives and briefly discuss the pros and
cons of each.
Mailbox Method - The Best Way
The best way to keep track of your
resource is to let us set it up with its own mailbox,
just like a regular user. When creating a meeting, you
can see the conference room's availability along with
everyone else's in the meeting planner. You invite the
conference room to the meeting, it automatically
accepts, and the time is booked in its calendar.
Despite what you may have read
elsewhere, third-party scripts, costly utilities,
programming, and special configurations are not
required. Exchange 2000 used with Outlook XP does this
out-of-the-box. It's part of the basic functionality
built-in by Microsoft. Here's all you need to do.
- Configure the resource to
automatically accept meeting invitations.
- Invite the resource 'as a resource'
when you create the meeting invitation.
The following steps and screen shots
demonstrate.
Using Outlook XP, log on to the
conference room's mailbox, as if you were the conference
room. You may want to create a separate Outlook profile
for the conference room mailbox. See Outlook
Profiles XP if you need help creating a new
profile.
- From the Tools menu choose
Options.
- From the Preferences tab page in the
Options dialog, click the Calendar Options
button.
- From the Calendar Options dialog,
click the Resource Scheduling button.
- The following dialog will appear.
Click to select the appropriate options, to let this
mailbox automatically accept and decline meeting
invitations.
- When you invite the resource to the
meeting, invite it as a resource, not as a required or
optional attendee. See the following screen shot. This
dialog is accessed by clicking the To: button in a
meeting request.
- The meeting planner will show the
availability of the resource as well as the required
and optional attendees. Click to enlarge the following
screen shot.
Public Folder Method - The Cheapest
Way
The only problem with the Mailbox Method
explained above is it requires the resource to have a
user account / mailbox, just like a person, and that
costs money. Microsoft charges us license fees based on
the number of user accounts / mailboxes, and we charge
clients the same way. Using a calendar-type public
folder to represent the resource does not require an
additional user account.
When you create the public folder,
specify that it will contain appointment
items.
At this point you can book the room
directly, by making entries in the public folder. You
can manipulate the permissions on the public folder to
control who in your workgroup has read / write access.
This alone is light-years ahead of having no system at
all, but there are drawbacks. At this stage the folder
does not appear in the global address list, you can't
invite the room to a meeting in the meeting planner to
automatically book it, and you can't see its
availability in the meeting planner.
Optionally, the next step could be to
email Exchange
Hosting Service tech support and ask us to
"mail-enable" this public folder (give us the exact name
and location).
If the public folder is mail-enabled,
you can see it listed in your global address list, and
you can invite it to a meeting in the meeting planner,
as a resource. It will not accept or decline the
invitation, but it will put the meeting in the calendar.
This means you're able to automatically book the room by
inviting it to a meeting.
The remaining drawback is you still can
not see the room's availability in the meeting planner.
It will show up as "no information available" in the
planner. You need to manually inspect the folder to
determine if the room is available. So mail-enabling the
folder is of limited use. Since you have to check
availability manually, some people say you might as well
forget about mail-enabling the folder and book the room
directly, or bite the bullet, get a user account /
mailbox for the conference room and take full advantage
of all that Exchange has to
offer. | 
