Rooms and Equipment as resources

Remember, a resource is an object like a conference room or shared event calendar that is administered by (typically) one person who makes it available to others within a work group. Resource calendars are often used to keep track of conference room availability or employee vacation time but can be used for a variety of different workflows. In Office 365, resources are broken down into two categories, Rooms and Equipment.

• Rooms - An account representing the availability of a particular classroom, conference room, or other space to be reserved.
• Equipment - An account representing the availability of a particular laptop, projector, vacation/calendar, or other non-room based calendar to be reserved.

Important: Once a resource is created, the type cannot be modified. You will need to delete and recreate a new resource with the desired type.

Note: These are only example definitions of what the accounts are intended to represent. The Office 365 team is aware that these resources can and will be used to represent other workflows that are not identified in the examples above.

Handling Reservations

Both the rooms and equipment resource types can be configured to handle reservation requests in two different ways.

• Moderated - Requests to reserve the resource must be approved or denied by the resource owner or an individual with specific rights to the resource.
• Auto-Accept - Requests to reserve the resource are automatically accepted, based on availability.

Each room/equipment resource has its own calendar, which can be viewed and modified just like a user's calendar can. When a request for a room or piece of equipment is accepted, an event is added to the resource's calendar.

Booking Window

All room and equipment resources in Exchange have a booking window, which defines how far in the future you can reserve a resource. By default, the booking window is 180 days. All events that attempt to reserve a resource outside of the booking window will be automatically declined. It is possible to modify the default booking window value.

Advanced options

The information above provides a general view of how rooms and equipment are handled in Exchange. It is possible to configure rooms and equipment in other ways.

The following advanced options for room and equipment resources are available:

• Extend or reduce the booking window for a resource
• Customize the response message that the meeting organizer will receive (for example, to provide instructions regarding a room or piece of equipment)
• Configure the resource to not send calendar-related emails to delegates
• Do not allow recurring meetings to be scheduled in conjunction with the room or equipment
• Set a room capacity (for example, specify that the room can hold 20 people)
• Configure the room to auto-accept for certain people, but require a delegate to moderate reservation requests made by all other people

Important: If you are unsure of the type of room you need to use or the best way to interact with a resource, please contact our team to discuss your options.