Best of Questions and Answers for Webcast: Improvements to Calendaring in Exchange 2007

Here are the questions and answers from today's  TechNet Webcast: Improvements to Calendaring in Exchange 2007 .

Thanks to all who attended!

-Kevin 

Questions and Answers:

“By 'room', are we talking a physical place or virtual place?”

It’s really up to you. Ordinarily people use this functionality so that they can reserve meeting rooms or some other equipment that needs to be requested and scheduled. So we’re talking physical here. But really, it could just as easily represent something more virtual – like a LiveMeeting account or something.

“Can you change the default amount of free/busy info that is published at the server instead of from the client, so that the default changes for everyone?”

I think you’re mis-understanding what’s happening now in Exchange 2007. Free/Busy information is no-longer published to some public folder location. All calendar information is pulled directly from the users calendars. This removes the latency issues that were problems in finding up-to-date information in previous versions of Exchange. And it also means that there really is nothing limiting how much information is “published”, because there’s no need to “publish” any more.

“Is this conflict notice in Outlook? I see that itis in OWA...but I've not seen it in Outlook where it will tell you what meeting is in conflict.”

Yes, you will see a conflict notice in Outlook also. It’s toward the top of the meeting request.

“If you create the resource this way will the account be disabled?”

This question was in response to the two ways I created Resource Mailboxes.

The first was to use ADUC to create the disabled users in Active Directory (representing Training Rooms 1 and 2), and then use the Manangement Shell to mail-enable those users, as well as set the “room” attribute on them.

The second way I did it was to use the Management Console, gave me the option to create the AD user account, as well do the mail-enabling and attribute setting. But it wasn’t clear when I did that that it also created the “Training Room 3” user account for me.

Yes, it was created, and was disabled just like the first two.

“When using the meeting request for scheduling staff for a certain job, is there a way for this request not to be added to my calendar?”

I hope I understand what you’re asking… You want to schedule people into something – but you don’t need it on YOUR calendar.

I’m sure there are a couple of ways you could do this. Perhaps you could create a resource mailbox for the “Job”, give yourself fullaccess rights to that mailbox (as I did in the demo for Holly to have fullaccess to the Training Rooms), and then use OWA to open that mailbox. Then schedule it directly from that “job”.

“Can I take database from exchange 5.5 and load to exchange 2007 (I need this for DR)”

No.. that’s not something you can do. You should look into the migration / upgrade steps you’ll have to take to move from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007. Here’s a good article on the subject: https://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/E2k7Help/a313c016-0e51-466e-a3de-953e1e0d347d.mspx?mfr=true