Enterprise Exchange / Office 365 Resources: You can manage them better

As an enterprise Exchange / Office 365 administrator you've probably run across some problems that drive you bug-house: security, backup, compliance, forensics, response time, .... the list drones on like a "Wonderwall" knock-off.

But one thing we can help you with is RESOURCES.  There are a series of things you can do to make your resource management smoother from an end-user experience in Exchange.  AND you can do them server-side.

The resources we're talking about here are the resources in a calendaring sense: Rooms and objects/services that are scheduled with meetings.  (I mean, you KNOW this is what the whole blog is about, right?)

A (few) word(s) of warning on prerequisites here:  it helps to have experience with PowerShell and Permissions.  You are definitely going to need experience setting permissions for resources in Exchange. 

We've blogged on all of this before, but this is the first time we've put it all together in one convenient post.

Let us begin.

Have you really thought through Delegate Access?

You may be using Delegate in the less effective way.  In general you should use booking delegation instead of classic delegation.

See: Two ways to grant access to a Resource in #MSFTExchange

Explanation:  Booking delegation makes it easier to access the resource should you need to (since classic delegation resources are disabled accounts by default) and you do not have issues with server vs. client-side rules and priorities.  

This does mean having resource delegation managed by the administrator.  As we proceed you'll increasingly see how this saves you hassle later on.

Do you ever have two meeting groups showing up for the same room?

You have had a double booking issue and didn't think you could do anything about it.

We KNOW you do because Double-Booked Meeting Rooms in Office 365 (and how to avoid them) is one of our most popular posts EVER!

But you can

If you just want to see how big an issue you have, use our reporting tool:
See: Callable PowerShell script to report on double booked resources in Exchange 2016 / Office 365
it's a PowerShell script that will tell you which resources have double-bookings.


If you want to proactively manage the issue on an on-going basis -- check out our solution to the problem:

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