Shared calendar - view by public, book by few, allow double-booking

[TheWkndr]

I'm not an exchange / network guy at all, so please excuse this. I am trying to give guidance to our outsourced exchage admin group as they are only doing what we tell them to do and I need some ideas.

We have a small group of people starting on MS CRM soon. These people book meetings with clients and the schedule of these meetings needs to be viewable by all employees. We think the best solution for this is using a shared calendar in Outlook (2003). We use this setup for our conference rooms so we suggested to our folks that they set up a calendar that works the same way. Apparently this is a resource and it works OK, but we have run into an issue - there is no double-booking of resources. These meetings will overlap at times and has rendered this solution unworkable.

1) I have been told that resources are not double-bookable and that is that. Is this true?
2) Is there a better way to set this up to get what we are looking for? In researching this it seems to be as simple as setting up a folder that holds calendar items only and giving write permissions to this small group and view permissions to everyone.

I am just looking for the proper way to tell our admins to set this up.

I appreciate your time and help with this.

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TheWkndr

 

[58sniper]

That all depends on how you're handing resource bookings. You can certainly have conflicting events under the right scenarios.

Pat Richard
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Contributing author Microsoft Exchange Server 2007: The Complete Reference