Tip Summary
You may not know that you can schedule a conference room, projector, speakerphone or whatever resource for your meetings through your Outlook client. This tip contains instructions for setting up the capability on Exchange server, and for doing the actual scheduling on the Outlook client.
There are some organizations that use multiple conference rooms to host
meetings, seminars and training sessions. There is typically a user who
is responsible for scheduling these rooms for these various occasions.
The scheduling process is a painstaking one because the user has to
manually enter the schedules when a request is made.
A simple way to resolve this problem is setting up these rooms as
resources in Exchange. In order to do this the following needs to be
done:
- Set up a mailbox for each conference room. (Of course you want to
apply the necessary information store restrictions to the mailboxes
to avoid a build up of information.)
- Set the primary Windows logon account to the person who'll be
accepting requests on behalf of the resource. (If more than one user
needs this ability, then include the others under the Permissions tab
for the mailbox.)
When you need to schedule a meeting or training session, you need to do
it in the Outlook client.
- Go to Calendar and select new appointment.
- Then enter the necessary information (date, time).
- Go to Attendee Availability.
- Select Invite Others.
- Choose the required/optional attendees.
- Select the resource(s), (conference room) that will be used for the meeting.
- Click OK to see the availability of the resource.
- Select a Start time and End time.
When the user has completed entering the necessary information, click
the send button. The request then goes to the person in charge of the
resource(s) room, and to all those who have been invited -- listing the
time, date and location of the meeting.
This tip stolen from Adesh Rampat, at
Tech Target