Create and Manage Room Mailboxes

A room mailbox is a resource mailbox that's assigned to a physical location, such as a conference room, an auditorium, or a training room. With room mailboxes, users can easily reserve these rooms by including room mailboxes in meeting requests.

To create a room mailbox, you need to be an administrator who is a member of either the Organization Management or Recipient Management role groups.

If you want to grant someone access to a room mailbox so they can directly manage its calendar (for example, an assistant who needs to make room for an executive meeting), you can do so by managing permissions for recipients.

Create a room mailbox

1. In the Exchange admin center, navigate to Recipients > Resources.

2. To create a room mailbox, click New  > Room mailbox.

3. Use the options on the page to specify the settings for the new resource mailbox.

   • Room name: Use this box to type a name for the room mailbox. This is the name that's listed in the resource mailbox list in the Exchange admin center and in your organization's address book. This name is required and it can't exceed 64 characters.

    Tip: Although there are other fields that describe the details of the room (for example, Location and Capacity) consider summarizing the most important details in the room name using a consistent naming convention. Why? So users can easily see the details when they select the room from the address book in the meeting request.

   • Alias: A room mailbox has an email address so it can receive booking requests. The email address consists of an alias on the left side of the @ symbol, which must be unique in the forest, and your domain name on the right. The alias is required.

   • Location, Phone, Capacity: You can use these fields to enter details about the room. However, as explained earlier, you can include some or all of this information in the room name so users can see it.

4. When you're finished, click Save to create the room mailbox.

After you've created a room mailbox, you can change how a room mailbox handles meeting requests (including whether it responds automatically or someone needs to decide what to do). By default, it'll automatically accept or decline requests depending on whether the requests conflict with any existing meetings on its calendar. It'll also allow meetings that repeat, and allow meetings up to 180 days from the current date (and decline any requests beyond that) that are up to 24 hours in duration. If you want to change other options, head down to change other room mailbox properties.

Change how a room mailbox handles meeting requests

1. In the Exchange admin center, navigate to Recipients > Resources.

2. In the list of resource mailboxes, click the room mailbox that you want to change the properties for, and then click Edit .

3. On the room mailbox properties page, click Booking Delegates (allow automatic responses or not) or Booking Options (allow repeating meetings, decline meetings that are scheduled too far out, etc).

Use the Booking Delegates section to view or change how the room mailbox handles meeting requests and to define who can accept or decline booking requests if it isn't done automatically.

• Select one of the following options to handle meeting requests.

  • Accept or decline booking requests automatically: If this is selected, the meeting request will automatically be declined if there's a scheduling conflict with an existing reservation, or if the booking request violates the scheduling limits of the resource, for example, the reservation duration is too long.

  • Select delegates who can accept or decline booking requests: If this is selected, one of the people you added to the Delegates list below will be responsible for accepting or declining meeting requests that are sent to the room mailbox. If you assign more than one resource delegate, only one of them has to act on a specific meeting request.

Use the Booking Options section to view or change the settings for the booking policy that defines when the room can be scheduled, how long it can be reserved, and how far in advance it can be reserved.

• Allow repeating meetings: This setting allows or prevents repeating meetings for the room.

• Allow scheduling only during working hours: This setting accepts or declines meeting requests that aren't during the working hours defined for the room, which are, by default, 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Monday through Friday. You can configure the working hours of the room mailbox either by logging into the mailbox using Outlook on the web and going to the Options > Calendar > Calendar appearance page.

• Always decline if the end date is beyond this limit: This setting controls the behavior of repeating meetings that extend beyond the date specified by the maximum booking lead time setting.

  • If you enable this setting, a repeating booking request is automatically declined if the bookings start on or before the date specified by the value in the Maximum booking lead time box, and they extend beyond the specified date. This is the default setting.

  • If you disable this setting, a repeating booking request is automatically accepted if booking requests start on or before the date specified by the value in the Maximum booking lead time box, and they extend beyond the specified date. However, the number of bookings is reduced so bookings won't occur after the specified date.

• Maximum booking lead time (days): This setting specifies the maximum number of days in advance that the room can be booked. Valid input is an integer between 0 and 1080. The default value is 180 days.

• Maximum duration (hours): This setting specifies the maximum duration that the room can be reserved in a booking request. The default value is 24 hours.

  For repeating booking requests, the maximum booking duration applies to the length of each instance of the repeating booking request.

There's also a box on this page that you can use to write a message that will be sent to users who send booking requests to reserve the room.

Use the Exchange admin center to change room mailbox properties

1. In the Exchange admin center, navigate to Recipients > Resources.

2. In the list of resource mailboxes, click the room mailbox that you want to change the properties for, and then click Edit .

3. On the room mailbox properties page, click one of the following sections to view or change properties (for booking options, see Change how a room mailbox handles meeting requests.

   • General

   • Contact Information

   • Email Address

   • MailTip

General

Use the General section to view or change basic information about the resource.

• Room name: This name appears in the resource mailbox list in the Exchange admin center and in your organization's address book. It can't exceed 64 characters if you change it.

• Email address: This read-only box displays the email address for the room mailbox. You can change it in the Email Address section.

• Capacity: Use this box to enter the maximum number of people who can safely occupy the room.

Click More options to view or change these additional properties:

• Organizational unit: This read-only box displays the organizational unit (OU) that contains the account for the room mailbox. You have to use Active Directory Users and Computers to move the account to a different OU.

• Mailbox database: This read-only box displays the name of the mailbox database that hosts the room mailbox. Use the Migration page in the Exchange admin center to move the mailbox to a different database.

• Alias Use this box to change the alias for the room mailbox.

• Hide from address lists: Select this check box to prevent the room mailbox from appearing in the address book and other address lists that are defined in your Exchange organization. After you select this check box, users can still send booking messages to the room mailbox by using the email address.

• Department: Use this box to specify a department name that the room is associated with. You can use this property to create recipient conditions for dynamic distribution groups and address lists.

• Company: Use this box to specify a company that the room is associated with, if applicable. Like the Department property, you can use this property to create recipient conditions for dynamic distribution groups and address lists.

• Address book policy: Use this option to specify an address book policy (ABP) for the room mailbox. ABPs contain a global address list (GAL), an offline address book (OAB), a room list, and a set of address lists. To learn more, see Address book policies in Exchange Server.

  In the drop-down list, select the policy that you want associated with this mailbox.

• Custom attributes: This section displays the custom attributes defined for the room mailbox. To specify custom attribute values, click Edit . You can specify up to 15 custom attributes for the recipient.

Contact Information

Use the Contact Information section to view or change the contact information for the room. The information on this page is displayed in the address book.

Email Address

Use the Email Address section to view or change the email addresses associated with the room mailbox. This includes the mailbox's primary SMTP address and any associated proxy addresses. The primary SMTP address (also known as the reply address) is displayed in bold text in the address list, with the uppercase SMTP value in the Type column.

• Add: Click Add  to add a new email address for this mailbox. Select one of following address types:

  • SMTP: This is the default address type. Click this button and then type the new SMTP address in the Email address box.

  • EUM: An EUM (Exchange Unified Messaging) address is used by the Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging service in Exchange 2016 to locate UM-enabled recipients within an Exchange organization. EUM addresses consist of the extension number and the UM dial plan for the UM-enabled user. Click this button and type the extension number in the Address/Extension box. Then click Browse and select a dial plan for the mailbox. (Note: Unified Messaging is not available in Exchange 2019.)

  • Custom address type: Click this button and type one of the supported non-SMTP email address types in the Email address box.

    Notes:

    • With the exception of X.400 addresses, Exchange doesn't validate custom addresses for correct formatting. You must make sure that the custom address you specify complies with the format requirements for that address type.

    • When you add a new email address, you have the option to make it the primary SMTP address.

• Automatically update email addresses based on the email address policy applied to this recipient: Select this check box to have the recipient's email addresses automatically updated based on changes made to email address policies in your organization.

MailTip

Use the MailTip section to add a MailTip to alert users of potential issues before they send a booking request to the room mailbox. A MailTip is text that's displayed in the InfoBar when this recipient is added to the To, Cc, or Bcc lines of a new email message.

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients/room-mailboxes?view=exchserver-2019