Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Three Basic Ways of Dealing with Double-Booked Resources in the Sumatra cmdlet

There are three basic ways of automatically dealing with double-booked resources in the Sumatra cmdlet suDoubleBookedMeetings.
  1. You guys work it out. aka Alert both (all) parties
  2. The early bird gets the room.  aka First one who booked wins
  3. Rank has its privileges.  aka VIPs win.  (Unless there's two of them then see 1.)
Let's look at the cases for each of those with this real-world double-booked meeting in Room 222 which both Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix have booked.





You guys work it out
You could think of this as the kinder-gentler "We're going to inform you but not enforce any changes" option.

Using this command:
Get-suDoubleBookedMeetings -ExchangeVersion 2013 -EWSurl "https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.ASMX" `
-PrimarySMTPAddress "room222@sumatra.onmicrosoft.com" `
-EmailOrganizers `
-ImpersonationAccount "ADMIN@sumatra.onmicrosoft.com" `
-Credential $LiveCred `
-bw 18 `
-licensefile "c:\users\ADMIN\Desktop\suDoubleBook\license.txt"

Each of them receives this notification and nothing is removed from the conference calendar.

The early bird gets the room:
using this command:

Get-suDoubleBookedMeetings -ExchangeVersion 2013 -EWSurl "https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.ASMX" `
-PrimarySMTPAddress "room222@sumatra.onmicrosoft.com" `
-DeclineConflicts `
-ImpersonationAccount "ADMIN@sumatra.onmicrosoft.com" `
-Credential $LiveCred `
-bw 10 `
-licensefile "c:\users\ADMIN\Desktop\suDoubleBook\license.txt"

Since Jimi Hendrix booked this slot in Room 222 before Janis Joplin did, under this scenario the room goes to Jimi and Janis is notified (Note that this notification comes directly from Microsoft Exchange):


Rank has its privileges
But let's say that Janis Joplin is a VIP and Jimi Hendrix is not.  Then, using this command:

Get-suDoubleBookedMeetings -ExchangeVersion 2013 `
-EWSurl "https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.ASMX" `
-PrimarySMTPAddress "room222@sumatra.onmicrosoft.com" `
-DeclineConflicts `
-VIPfile "c:\users\ADMIN\Desktop\suDoubleBook\vips.txt" `
-VIPsGetBookingPreference `
-ImpersonationAccount "ADMIN@sumatra.onmicrosoft.com" `
-Credential $LiveCred `
-bw 180 `
-licensefile "c:\users\ADMIN\Desktop\suDoubleBook\license.txt"


Janis gets the room and Jimi is declined by the conference room.  Note that this results in the exact OPPOSITE of the situation just described above.


We think this covers all the social hierarchy choices you should have to make with the conference room, but please feel free to let us know.

$LiveCred is a variable we've set up to store credentials to the Exchange server in PowerShell.  Check out our earlier postings if you're unsure how to do this.

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