How to Create and configure a meeting room mailbox with Exchange Server 2007

Matt, this post is a little long, but I’ve spent a lot of time on this so I thought I would pass on what I’ve found so far.  Hope it helps.  While you can use direct booking in exchange 2007 keep in mind that you have to set Author permissions for direct

booking to function properly.  The downside to that is anyone that has author permissions can see the full details of any meeting on the conference room calendar.  Unfortunately having all calendar information won’t work for my company so we are converting

over to resource rooms.  One thing you can do to kind of get around not getting a  pop up notification deficiency is to instruct users to book the conference room first then add the attendees.  if users need  to see the free busy information of the attendees,

open up two meetings.  one for the attendees and the other for the conference room.  find a time then see if its available on the conference room.  I know it’s a two step process but that's a lot better than having to update 20+ attendees every time the conference

room declines your meeting.

This is following paragraph/link outlines why direct booking allows the pop up message before you schedule a meeting.   The main difference is with direct book you use the outlook client of the organizer to schedule the meeting.  That is why you receive the

pop up notification before you send the meeting request.  It is also why it requires author permission to the conference room calendar because you are not sending any meeting notification to the mailbox that’s set up for direct booking.  Rather you use the

author permissions to gain access to the calendar.  The resource room method uses the calendar attendant to processes the meeting request which happens after you send the meeting request. This is also why you don’t require author permissions for the conference

room calendars that are configured as a resource and also why you don’t receive a pop up notification like you do with direct booking.  My hope is that someone in MS will include some logic to the resource rooms.  Where if you have both conference rooms and

required attendees that the meeting request gets sent first to the resource room and will only send to the required attendees after you receive an accepted response from the resource room…I have not found anything yet so I don’t think it’s possible.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/05/14/438944.aspx

Direct booking is an Outlook-specific feature that uses the organizer's Outlook client (Outlook 2000 or later) to book an appointment directly into a resource mailbox schedule. 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. The resource mailbox must be manually configured with Outlook to support direct booking. It can be set up to allow automatically accept non-conflicting meeting requests

and to allow/deny recurring bookings.

Advantages of Direct booking:

1. Immediate confirmation/denial of booking request.

2. It has the logic to avoid double-booking.

With these advantages in mind, some disadvantages of Direct booking include:

1. Direct booking requires granting organizer read/write permissions on the calendar. Hence, users can just go onto the resource's calendar and delete existing meetings to free up space for their own meetings.

2. Organizer must remember to designate resource as "Resource" and not "Required" or "Optional". No conflict checking is done if resource specified as one of the latter (rule on resource's inbox should be created to generate reply to this effect).

3. Since there is availability against free/busy, latency in free/busy replication can result in double-booking.

4. Conflicts aren't detected beyond the range of published free/busy and can result in double-booking.

5. Outlook Web Access does not currently support the "direct booking" of meeting requests.