One of the difficulties Outlook users face when they are scheduling a meeting request is finding an available meeting room. Some people work around this by adding a bunch of rooms to the meeting invite so that they can see the free/busy information for them, and then remove all of them except for the one they want to keep.
That might work fine for some people but others would find it too cumbersome. Fortunately Exchange Server 2010 and Outlook 2010 make it possible for people to easily find available rooms when they are setting up a meeting invite.
In Outlook 2010 the new meeting window has a section called the Room Finder.
The Room Finder has a drop down menu to “Show a room list”. A room list is a special type of Exchange 2010 distribution group that contains room mailboxes.
When the distribution group is created using the New-DistributionGroup command an optional switch of -roomlist is used to designated it as a room list.
New-DistributionGroup "Head Office Meeting Rooms" -RoomList
After creating a room list you then add room mailboxes as members of the distribution group.
Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "Head Office Meeting Rooms" -Member meetingroom1 Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "Head Office Meeting Rooms" -Member meetingroom2
In my testing of this feature it took around 24 hours for the room list to start appearing properly in Outlook, so if you don’t see immediate results you might just need to wait a while.
After it is working properly you’ll now see the room list in the Room Finder in Outlook. It will also suggest times based on which attendees you’ve invited, and show you how many rooms in that room list are available at that time.
The Scheduling Assistant view will also show you the rooms that are members of the chosen room list, all without you having to add them individually to the meeting request. And once you have picked which room you want you simply select it in the Room Finder and it becomes the room for the meeting invite.
As you can see this makes it very simple for your users to quickly find available rooms in Outlook 2010 when they are scheduling meetings.
About Paul Cunningham
Excellent! I did not realise this. Deployed.
Yeah, it’s excellent as long as you don’t need a room for a recurring meeting, or need to start the meeting at a time not on :00 or :30 of the hour, as suggestions won’t be generated for these options; coming from Domino, the resource booking in Exchange is unfortunately archaic!
Does anyone know of a solution or feasible workaround for finding an available room(s) for a recurring meeting?
Paul,
Is there any way to default the “Show a room list” drop down to your Meeting Room Distribution List instead of having it default to None?
Rob
Not to my knowledge Rob.
Paul,
Do you know if its possible to create similar group for Equipment Mailboxes (“EquipmentList instead of RoomList)?
Helgi
Hello,
Does anyone knows why the room finder function is only able to give suggestions for available meetingsrooms for meetings lasting less than a day. I havn’t been able to find anything on print stating that this is by design, and I really miss the feature to been able to book a room for multiple days meetings.
Best regards,
Jakob
Did you figure this out Jakob, I’m stuck on the same thing.
Hey,
I didn’t, Unfortunately. Glad to read your post, I was starting to feel quite alone in the world with this issue about Roomfinder. In the meantime i changed job, so I’m not stucked with the problem anylonger (for now at least;-) I just can’t figured out, why the limitation isn’t mentioned anywhere. (You’re the first, besides myself, having this Issue, according to my Google searching a couple of months ago)
Best Regards,
Jakob
Same problem here…
@Jakob, @Tovy, @nick
Every meeting room has a Resource Policy. One of the options there is ‘Maximum duration (minutes)’ and this defaults to 1440 minutes or 1 day. Have you tried increasing this limit?
I am new to Exchnage & have no idea if that will fix your request.
hanks for an veruseful explanation. I have implemented this and it works great. One question, Is it possible to apply restrictions to deleting a resource booking in the same way as you do creating it. I want to prevent “accidental” deletion of bookings.
Thanks
Robert
I have mixed Exchange 2003 and 2010 env all of a sudden my room mailboxes disappered from All rooms in outlook client and OWA .
However i am able to see them in EMC , what is that i am missing …Please help!!!
I’m a user, not an administrator. I was hoping that I could add the Room Finder option and use personal distribution lists. This appears not to be the case.
Can you confirm that the Room Finder function is only something that works if set up by the Outlook server administrator? Or is there a way that end-users can make it work on their own?
Thanks,
Rachel
Hi Rachel,
Yes, the room finder uses special distribution groups called room lists that are created on the Exchange server. To my knowledge, there is no way for you to achieve the same result using personal groups.
Is it possible to restrict who can see which room list? For example, I do not want users in Chicago to see room lists from NY.
I would assume (but have not tested) that it could be done with Address Book Policies.
I concur – you can do this with Address Book Policies, but be aware that you are create a lot of overhead to hide the room lists, as you will have to define a GAL, OAB, and individual address lists for each site, add them to an address book policy for each site and then assign that policy to the mailboxes in that site.
That whole panel seems to be missing if you are using the Mac client. booo!