Exchange 2007 Resource Room Reservations

Question

When a resource room is reserved in Outlook (using 2003 with Exch 2007), it automatically is deleted (by Exch presumably) after six months. The scenario is this: At the start of each calendar year, our users will schedule recurring weekly meetings in Outlook for the entire year. But after six months, those blocked off times are shown as available users not included in the original meeting, even though it still shows on the organizer's and attendee's Outlook calendars. This leads to the 3rd party creating a meeting that overlaps with the originals.

I'd like to know how to change the auto delete and extend it to match the duration as set by the meeting creator.

Answer 1

You have a limit on the number of days into the future your resource can be booked. ("Booking Window." By default, this is set to 180 days in Exchange.) I don't have a copy of Exchange 2007 in front of me, so I can't tell you where to go in the GUI to change that, (except to say it's somewhere in the properties for the resource/shared mailbox in questions) but with PowerShell, you'd use the following:

Get the settings on specified Mailbox:

Get-MailboxCalendarSettings [ResourceName] |fl

BookingWindowInDays would be the attribute you're looking for, which you could change with:

Set-MailboxCalendarSettings [ResourceName] -BookingWindowInDays [desired number of days]

Though, personally, I just tell my users to suck it up. You have to reschedule a recurring meeting twice a year? Boohoo.

If you don't set limits, you have users booking meetings and cluttering up the calendar for years after the meeting's actually held or the attendees are with the company. (Back on Domino, I even had a bunch of users who had a habit of booking recurring meetings for 100 years... sigh) YMMV, and all that, but be careful about letting users book meetings too far out, or they will, and next thing you know, you'll be wondering how hard it really is to get away with murder.