Ok, first technical post. I recently had to figure out the best way to do shared calendars in Exchange 2007. I used to do this with public folders and it worked well enough, but the word is, thats a no-no anymore. So we have to go the shared mailbox route. By no means am I an exchange master, but I don't see why public folders aren't the best option for this, instead of creating a whole mailbox, why couldn't they just add some basic extensions to the public folder options to give them more functionality, and leave the mailboxes to what you would think they would be for; a person receiving mail.
Anyway, since Windows and Exchange 2007 seem to be going the command line route, we have to change some settings and permissions through the exchange management shell. Further in this post, I'll go through the commands that I needed to get my install working.
First, create a mailbox through the exchange gui. They do not give you the options to create a "shared" mailbox through the gui. Supposedly, you can create a Shared Mailbox from the command line, but I find that creating a Room mailbox from the gui works just fine.
In this case, we'll create a room mailbox named "Vacation Calendar" with an alias of "Vacation"
After creating a mailbox called "Vacation", open up your good ol' exchange shell. *Note, at this point, you can also create a security group through active directory users and computers to assign mailbox privileges, in this case, I created "Exchange Vacation Users".
In the management shell type:
c:\Add-MailboxPermission Vacation -User:'Exchange Vacation Users' -AccessRights:FullAccess
This will grant the AD group mailbox access rights.
c:\Add-ADPermission "Vacation Calendar" -User:'Exchange Vacation Users' -ExtendedRights:Send-As -AccessRights:ReadProperty, WriteProperty -Properties:'Personal Information'
The above grants additional necessary rights. This can probably be tweaked some, but it worked for me.
You now have a shared mailbox, calendar, whatever. You can modify the options for the shared resource, by logging into Outlook Web Access, click on your name in the upper right hand corner, type Vacation in the "open another mailbox". Once the Vacation mailbox is opened you can click on options and going to resource options on the left:
0 Trackbacks