Show Full Free/Busy Details for Exchange Server 2010 Room and Resource Mailboxes

Consider the scenario where a room is booked, and perhaps another person wants to contact existing meeting organizers to ask if they can remove a booking to make room for a more important one, but the free/busy information (as seen in the Outlook Scheduling Assistant) doesn’t indicate who made the bookings.

This is caused by the default permissions on the mailbox’s calendar. These default permissions are set to show only the availability information (eg free, busy, tentative) but not any other details.

In the calendar permissions (if you were modifying them via Outlook) it would look like this.

If viewed in the shell it with Get-MailboxFolderPermission it would appear like this.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxFolderPermission homeetingroom1:\Calendar

RunspaceId   : 8706cde4-2cb5-4519-9a46-a46fcc0c450c
FolderName   : Calendar
User         : Default
AccessRights : {AvailabilityOnly}
Identity     : Default
IsValid      : True

If you modified the permissions using Outlook the new permission level of Reviewer would allow other users to see more details about existing meetings.

You can apply that same permission in the Exchange Management Shell using the Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet (note: Set-MailboxFolderPermission modifies an existing entry, whereas Add-MailboxFolderPermission would be used to add a new entry to the permissions).

Set-MailboxFolderPermission homeetingroom1:\Calendar -User Default -AccessRights Reviewer

The results can be seen in the Get-MailboxFolderPermission output.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxFolderPermission homeetingroom1:\Calendar

RunspaceId   : 8706cde4-2cb5-4519-9a46-a46fcc0c450c
FolderName   : Calendar
User         : Default
AccessRights : {Reviewer}
Identity     : Default
IsValid      : True

RunspaceId   : 8706cde4-2cb5-4519-9a46-a46fcc0c450c
FolderName   : Calendar
User         : Anonymous
AccessRights : {None}
Identity     : Anonymous
IsValid      : True

When creating a new meeting request users are now able to see more details about the meeting organizer.

You can modify all the default permissions on Room mailboxes with the following commands in the Exchange Management Shell.

[PS] C:\>$rooms = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox
[PS] C:\>$rooms | %{Set-MailboxFolderPermission $_":\Calendar" -User Default -AccessRights Reviewer}


thanks,
MS Geek