Exch 2000/Outlook Shared Meeting Room Calendar w/Logic

[willrsmith]

Back in the days of Exchange 5.5 it was possible to create a Public folder that could be used for booking a meeting room or a item of equiptment. You could build in a form of logic to the public folder so that the room/equiptment could not be double booked and if it was a meeting room that was being booked, you could also look at the atendees list and see who had accepted/rejected the meeting.

With Exchange 2000, I can only find some non useful MS refernces to creating a public folder for a meeting room (calendar type). I need to create one that will not allow for double booking, will send an email to all atendees to allow them to accept or reject and also show in the public folder who has accepted/rejected.

I believe to do this correctly, you need to not only create the logic behind the public folder (possibly through the use of a form) but you also need to syncronise with your mailbox calendar.

I cant find the MS documents, that I have seen before, and as I recall, on Exch 5.5 it was set up through Forms with the Free/Busy connector, however I am unsure if it would now be a custom form using sinks.

Can anyone help? Has anyone done this on Exchange 2000? Can it be done? Am I making sense?

Thanks in advance
Will

 

[striperstalker]

You are making sense.

You could create a public folder and create a form to book the room and show it's availability. However, that's kind of a pain in the butt. What I've done with all of our conference rooms and other resources like cars, projectors, teleconference equipment etc. is to create a resources OU and create mail enabled objects for them in AD with exchange accounts. Give everyone author rights to the calendars so they can book the resources but only if they are available (Free/Busy is still the backbone for this, thank you Schedule+). The calendars will show the resources as busy if they have been reserved by someone else, from here users can invite others to join them and request invitiation confirmation.

 

[Goat]

Hi there striperstalker

that sounds interesting - would you mind expanding on what you mean and how you do it?

I will then pass it on to our sys admin.

Cheers