In the current job, I’m dealing with Microsoft-based administrator more than I ever have before. I don’t mind too much, it gives me a few more skills, and another bullet point or three on the resume. Today, however, Exchange has been driving me batty.
We have Exchange 2003 – it’s not bad once it’s had all of the service packs applied. We also, until today, managed our meeting rooms on a bit of paper. This morning, the request came through to investigate the use of Exchange as a meeting room management tool; shouldn’t be too hard to do really, and it isn’t.
- Create a new Active Directory user, and stick it in a service account OU.
- Assign the user a rather long password, it’s only going to be used on occasion.
- Create a mail profile for Outlook, and log in to the meeting room account.
- Configure the account to automatically accept meetings and cancellations, and also provide conflict detection. Oh, don’t forget the rights for Authors and Editors (create/edit own and edit all respectively).
- Log back in to a regular Exchange account, and schedule a meeting, with the meeting room as an invited attendee.
- Remember to throw the flag that says the meeting room user is actually a resource. Every. Single. Time.
It’s step 6 that gets me – why can’t I tell Active Directory, and thus Exchange, that I want a new object of type resource, rather than new object of type user? Why do I have to remember to change that flag for that user every time?
Argh.