Please help fix this broken Reception room booking process

[Tundraswan]

Currently, our consultants are told to create a meeting request and add "Reception London" and other attendees to the meeting. "Reception London" (shared account/mailbox) has the responsibility to check room availability and determine the room, they drag and drop (move) the meeting into a space in one of the 15 or so meeting room calendars (the meeting rooms are users with mailboxes in AD). After moving the calendar item to the appropriate meeting room calendar, they open the item, manually type in the name of the meeting room in the "Location" field and then accept the invite. The organiser receives the meeting response from "Reception London on the behalf of Meeting Room XX" with the Location field as manually entered. This is where the process ends.

The problem is that currently, only the organiser receives some indication of where the room is through the meeting response. If the other attendees open up their calendar item, it appears as it was specified originally by the organiser, they do not see the manual entry that the Reception performed and remain unaware of the location of the meeting, response by Reception London and the amendments made by them. I believe this is because of the "attendee" status of the Reception in the whole process.

Ideally, I would like to setup resource booking, put responsibility of booking rooms onto the consultants rather than the reception. Sadly, this has been nixed citing our consultants IT illiteracy, along with the fact that the consultants are constantly time pressured, so any new process which needs extra input or training by/for them will be rejected.

The business want this to be fixed with the least amount of clicks and addition to process. Quick and dirty is good on this occasion.

Welcome your thoughts! Thanks.

 

[ntinlin]

Have you looked at the Exchange AutoAccept agent which is part of the ExAllTools package?

It's a bit of a pest to configure but once it is done it allows the room itself to respond automatically and users can simply check free/busy to see if room is available.
The reception people can still administer the rooms and cancel inappropriate bookings.

Neill

 

[netjess]

Sounds like you might want to set it up as a moderated folder.

If you would like some reading to help understand the options and how to use them here are some pages you might go over.

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Booking-Resources-ExchangeServer-2003-Outlook-System-2003.html

http://www.msexchange.org/articles/Creating-Using-Moderated-Public-Folders-Exchange-Server.html

You might also read:
Understanding Auto Accept Agent

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124617(EXCHG.65).aspx

Auto Accept Agent Deployment and Administration Guide

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997184(EXCHG.65).aspx

This changes in Exchange 2010.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124952.aspx