Handling Conference Rooms in a migration into Exchange

Resources are kind of a pain in the neck in a migration. You want them to take care of themselves when you're done migrating. But to get your data from your old system into your new system with the same state, you're going to need to treat them with kid gloves and lots of TLC.

So we have the following guidelines:

Put all resources in one or more OUs for ease of administration.
PRIOR to migration:

• ENABLE all of the resource accounts via Active Directory Users and Computers
• HIDE the accounts from the GAL
• Configure resources NOT to AutoAccept meetings

AFTER the migration

• Disable the accounts and add them to the GAL
• Configure the resource for AutoAccept (if you desire first-come-first-served functionality) or
• Use group-policy settings for managed rooms and resources