Problems with Some Room and Equipment Resources

The Exchange Account Manager (EAM) tool ensures that Resource accounts are set up in a standard manner. Prior to EAM, Resources were set up manually, which allowed some inconsistencies to creep in. This has led to some reports of resources not working or of resource owners losing permissions to resources.

If you previously had access to a resource and no longer have that access, you (or the account's administrator) should use EAM to manage the resource and follow the instructions to grant full access to those who should have it. After waiting two hours for the scheduled maintenance tasks to propagate those changes into Exchange, you should regain access to the resource.

Take me to the EAM.

Problems with Delegation and Permissions

The Exchange permissions model is complex, allowing the setting of very fine-grained permissions at several levels. As Peter Parker's Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility (or great confusion, we might add). EAM tries to simplify the choices somewhat, but it's still complex. We're sorry, and we'll try to help you through it.

The Roles, set using EAM, are the broadest level of permission. The Access role grants full access to the entire Exchange account, including all folders. The SendAs role grants access to send mail as that account.

You may also grant specific permissions to the calendar of the resource. The three basic levels are

• Reviewer - can see all items on the calendar
• Author - can see all items, and can add items to the calendar or modify items that he/she owns
• Editor - can see all items, and can add/modify/delete any item on the calendar regardless of ownership

If someone is in the Access role mentioned above, these permissions are irrelevant because the Access permission confers greater privileges than any of these.

Best Practices for Room Scheduling

A common practice held over from the days of Oracle Calendar is to grant everyone in a workgroup Editor permission on a calendar, and to allow people to directly place meetings on the calendar of the room. In Exchange, this bypasses all the schedule processing built into the system, allowing rooms to be double booked, allowing people to cancel other people's meetings (sometimes without realizing it), and leading to practices of continuously having many calendars open to allow the picking of rooms. The best practice in Exchange is to use the Scheduling Assistant in Outlook or OWA. Even if you're reserving a room for your sole use, use the Scheduling Assistant to invite the room; this puts the reservation both on your calendar and on the room's calendar. In the scheduling assistant, you can select a number of candidate rooms, easily see their availability in the grid view, then select the room that meets your needs. CIT recommends having at most one or two people with Editor privileges, and encouraging everyone else to use Scheduling Assistant to book the resources.