The combination of Exchange Server and Outlook calendaring features provides you with powerful resource- scheduling tools. If you have an Exchange environment in which all the email clients are Outlook 2000 or later, you can implement a feature that Microsoft calls direct booking. In this overview of the technology, I explain how to set up direct booking, give you a few caveats to consider as you use the feature, and provide some tips for making it more user-friendly.
Direct Booking a Resource
Before Exchange and Outlook tools became available, if you needed to use a resource, such as a conference room or audiovisual equipment, you would contact a person, who would check a schedule and tell you whether the resource was available. The direct-booking mechanism eliminates the need to contact another person to check a resource's availability and reserve a time slot in a resource's schedule; direct booking schedules an appointment directly into the Outlook Calendar.
Beginning with Outlook 97, you could do a rudimentary form of direct booking by configuring a delegate client for the resource mailbox to always accept meeting requests. Because the Outlook client processes incoming calendar requests for resources the same way it processes incoming meeting requests, you needed to leave the client logged on and running for resource and conflict checking. With the release of Outlook 2000, Microsoft enhanced Outlook's ability to perform these booking tasks. You no longer need to leave an Outlook client running, and no server-side scripting is required. The Outlook client of the person organizing the meeting performs all the necessary tasks, such as conflict checking and placing the reservation on the resource calendar. To implement direct booking, you need Outlook 2000 or later and a properly configured mailbox on an Exchange 2000 Server or Exchange Server 5.5 server.
Resource Setup in 3 Steps
The first step in setting up a resource you want people to be able to schedule (e.g., the sample resource called Main Conference Room I use throughout this article) is to create a mailbox to hold the resource calendar. Other than granting yourself the rights to access the mailbox as a user, you don't have to configure any special settings on the server. Note that in an Exchange 5.5 environment, you can assign the Main Conference Room mailbox to an existing Windows NT account. However, if you use Exchange 2000, you need to create a new Windows 2000 account and assign the mailbox to that account.
Second, create an Outlook profile to access the Main Conference Room mailbox and use that profile to open Outlook. Right-click the Calendar folder, click Properties, then select the Permissions tab. You can either change the role for the default user or add a distribution list (DL) of the users who need permission to reserve the resource. (In Exchange 2000, you'll need to use a security group.) Adding a DL is usually preferable to modifying the default permissions because a DL gives you better control over who can use the resource. As Figure 1 shows, I added a DL called mcr-users and assigned it the role of Author. Granting Author permissions lets members of the DL book the resource and modify their reservations but prevents them from modifying a reservation that someone else has made. After you set the role to Author, close the Properties dialog box by clicking OK.
Third, select Options from Outlook's Tools menu. Select the Preferences tab, then click Calendar Options. Click the Resource Scheduling button, and you'll see three check boxes, which Figure 2 shows. Select the first option, Automatically accept meeting requests and process cancellations, and the second option, Automatically decline conflicting meeting requests. Leave the last check box, Automatically decline recurring meeting requests, blank unless you don't want people to book recurring usage of this resource.
Click OK three times to exit the Options pages, then exit Outlook. The resource mailbox is now ready to accept reservations.
Reserving a Resource
To reserve a resource, you (or DL members) simply create a meeting request, specifying the required or optional attendees in the appropriate fields and the required resource (i.e., Main Conference Room) in the Resources field, as Figure 3 shows. Click OK, and Outlook will attempt to reserve the resource. If the time slot you requested is available, you receive a confirmation message on your screen, as Figure 4, page 14, shows, and Outlook sends the meeting request to the attendees. If the resource isn't available, you receive a rejection message and Outlook doesn't send the meeting request; instead, Outlook lets you modify the request. Because Outlook didn't send the meeting request, you're spared the hassle of sending one or more updated meeting requests as you try to find an available time slot. The attendees also don't have to respond to multiple meeting updates and are spared the confusion of sorting out exactly when you want to have the meeting, which often happens when you send multiple meeting updates.
How Direct Booking Works
When a meeting organizer designates a mailbox as a resource in a meeting request, Outlook performs a few special steps when he or she sends the request. First, Outlook reads configuration information from the designated mailbox to determine whether to attempt direct booking. You set this configuration information when you selected the various check boxes in the Resource Scheduling dialog box. If you didn't select the Automatically accept meeting requests and process cancellations option, Outlook sends a meeting request to the resource mailbox, just as it would for any other attendee. If you selected this option, the meeting organizer's Outlook client attempts to book the resource as follows: If, in addition to the first option, you selected the Automatically decline conflicting meeting requests option, Outlook reads the free/busy information for the mailbox's calendar and uses this information to determine whether the resource is available for the date and time requested. If the resource is available, Outlook writes the appointment directly to the resource's calendar. If you selected the Automatically decline recurring meeting requests option, Outlook will decline any request that's recurring.