Resource mailboxes are very popular to enable the booking of meeting rooms or company cars. With Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016, it has become even easier to manage the rooms.
Here is a small howto that works with Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016 (For Exchange 2010 you can find the howto here)
First, a new room mailbox is created via ECP
The room is given a corresponding name and alias, and further details can also be entered here, for example the telephone number if the room has a telephone, or the capacity. In this example 5, specifying the capacity means that appointments with more people are rejected.
As soon as the mailbox has been created, the booking options can be configured. For example, you can specify how far in advance the room can be booked or how long an appointment can be. However, the settings are optional, the automatic booking function is switched on by default.
In Outlook, the room appears in the scheduling assistant and can be booked.
The meeting room automatically confirms appointments as long as there are no conflicts. The organizer of the appointment is informed by e-mail whether the room could be booked successfully
The room can also be integrated as a calendar in Outlook for a better overview, which was not quite so easy with Exchange 2010:
In the standard setting, users only see that there is a corresponding appointment, all other information is not directly visible:
However, this can be adjusted by changing the permissions on the mailbox calendar. It also often makes sense to define a kind of manager for the rooms who can reschedule appointments in the event of a conflict. The corresponding rights to cancel appointments and to view them can be easily assigned via the management shell:
Get-MailboxFolderPermission besprechungsraum:\calendar | Add-MailboxFolderPermission -User administrator -AccessRights Editor
In diesem Beispiel bekommt der Benutzer Administrator „Bearbeiter“ Rechte, welches es ihm ermöglicht den Raum zu verwalten.
Now the user can see all the details of the appointments and can also cancel them if necessary.
Another nice feature is the customization of the booking confirmation, where a corresponding text can be stored for the organizer:
Zum Beispiel ein Link zu einer internen Webseite, auf dem der Organisator Kaffee und Kekse ordern kann, oder der Hinweis „Wehe wenn du nicht aufräumst…“
Here, of course, SharePoint or something similar is a good option...