We were expanding into a new building and I was tasked with setting
up the new conference rooms so that they could be scheduled through
Outlook/Exchange. I recall from many years ago that there was much
idiocy to setting up such things, so I asked the interweb for
assistance.
Early in my searches I came across a page from Microsoft TechNet
entitled Set
Up a Conference Room as an Outlook 2000 Resource (another set of
instructions doing the same thing is here). I
followed the instructions (Ignoring how silly it is to need to create a
profile in Outlook for each resource you wish to manage) and surprise
surprise it works. Great, on to test it with Evolution and the Exchange
Connector. Nope, it doesn't work. But clearly it should work from
the Outlook Web Interface provided by the Exchange Server, right? Hmmm,
no that doesn't work there either.
I guess the page was serious with the prerequisite of "You must be
using Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5." Further
investigation confirms that that solution only works when using
Outlook 2000 or greater as the client to setup the meeting. More info
here
(note Windows IT Pro magazine subscription required to access).
Still further investigation yields an interesting page entitled Scheduling
Resources for Microsoft Outlook that says that there are two primary
ways to allow Outlook users to schedule shared resources automatically.
1) setup each resource as an Exchange Server mailbox and do various bits
of trickery to make it auto accept meeting requests or 2) create a
public folder that holds appointment items and allow various groups of
users permission to read and write to it.
In the end I find that the conference rooms we already have in our
Exchange system were implemented using the first option with a tool
called the Microsoft
Exchange Server Auto Accept Agent (download
here. I created new users (this does of course use up a CAL)
to represent each of the new conference rooms, setup Outlook profiles
for each so I could change permissions on the new calendars, and
finally, using the command line VB scripts from the Auto Accept Agent,
added the new conference rooms to the monitored mailboxes list.
The Auto Accept Agent basically snags incoming meeting requests to
registered mailboxes and processes them based on criteria (if the room
is available, if the event is in the future, etc.). Registering
mailboxes to check is done through a trio of command line VB scripts.
Managing the behavior is done through editing an xml file. Another more
full featured option (which I would have used had MS's solution not
already been configured on the server) appears to be the open source AutoAccept Sink for
Exchange
The sad part, is that about half way through the day (about the time
I learned that Outlook and the Outlook Web Interface behaved
differently) I took a break from fighting with Exchange and Outlook and
voluntarily went to read the Sun Grid Enginedocumentation.
When a product is so frustratingly annoying that I voluntarily go to
read a very very dull manual to take a break, there is clearly something
wrong.
