Applies to: Office 365 for professionals and small businesses, Office 365 for enterprises, Live@edu
Topic Last Modified: 2011-03-19
Resource mailboxes are special mailboxes that are used to reserve conference rooms and equipment. After an administrator creates resource mailboxes, users can easily reserve rooms and equipment by including resource mailboxes in meeting requests.
The following types of resource mailboxes are available:
-
Room mailboxes These mailboxes are assigned to physical locations, such as conference rooms, auditoriums, and training labs. You can create room mailboxes in the Exchange Control Panel. For more information, see Create a New Room Mailbox.
-
Equipment mailboxes These mailboxes are assigned to resources that don't have a specific location, such as portable computers, audio-visual equipment, or vehicles. You can create equipment mailboxes in Windows PowerShell only. This topic explains how to do this.
Before you begin
To learn how to install and configure Windows PowerShell and connect to the service, see Use Windows PowerShell in Exchange Online.
Create an equipment mailbox in Windows PowerShell
To create an equipment mailbox, perform the following steps:
-
Create the equipment mailbox.
-
Configure the mailbox to automatically process meeting requests.
Note This step is required even if you plan on restricting who can reserve the equipment by requiring approval for all reservation requests.
1. Create the equipment mailbox
Run the following command:
For example, to create an equipment mailbox named "Notebook Computer 1", run the following command:
Note You can also create a room mailbox using the command New-Mailbox -Name <name> -Room.
2. Configure the mailbox to automatically process meeting requests
Run the following command:
For example, to configure the equipment mailbox named "Notebook Computer 1" to automatically process meeting requests, run the following command:
That's it. You're done. You now have a functioning equipment mailbox that is ready to turn meeting requests from any of your users into conflict-free resource reservations.
View existing room and equipment mailboxes
You can use the Exchange Control Panel to view, filter, and sort the list of mailboxes. However, you can't filter the list to show equipment mailboxes only. You can only filter the list to show room mailboxes. To filter the list to show room mailboxes, equipment mailboxes, or both, you can use Windows PowerShell. For more information, see View and Filter Mailboxes.
Next steps
Now that you know how to create equipment mailboxes, you'll want to learn more about how to refine the scheduling features of the mailbox. For example, you can assign resource mailbox owners who are responsible for approving or rejecting reservation requests, and you can define acceptable and unacceptable resource reservation requests. Here's how:
