Create room and equipment mailboxes - Microsoft 365 Tutorial

- [Instructor] I'm in the Exchange Admin Center, and there's a different type of mailbox that we can create, and it's called a Resource Mailbox. Resource Mailboxes come in a couple of different flavors. Underneath the Recipients in the Exchange Admin Center, just click on Resources, and the first option is going to be to create a room resource. A room resource is a great idea if you have, say, a conference room or multiple conference rooms and you want to be able to reserve those conference rooms from any email account. And you could also make it so they can only be reserved from specific accounts. I'm going to call this one the East Conference Room, and I'll give it the email address of East Room and then I'll choose the domain at officeemail.net. And we want to make sure there's no spaces in there between the words. Click Next. And now we want to choose the capacity. So the capacity is going to be how many people are going to be allowed to be in this room when you go to reserve it? I'll say 25 people can be in there. The location is going to be the East Side and then the phone number, if it's applicable, you can go ahead and add that in, department and other information. I'm going to leave the rest of this all blank, but you can fill it in if you'd like. And you can also choose Repeating Meetings. Repeating meetings basically means that let's say every Monday at 10 o'clock, you're going to reserve this room for the next two months. So that is one way to do it. If you choose not to allow repeating meeting, then you can just uncheck that. Then there's scheduling only during work hours, so that means basically eight to five or whatever it is that you set your work hours to be. Automatically decline meetings outside of the booking limits window. So if you have a limitation where, say you try to do this 185 days in the future, it will reject that particular automatic meeting setup. And here are the booking windows day limitations. Right now it's set to 180 days. You can change it to whatever you'd like. Maybe you only want to do it a hundred days, and this keeps people from booking the room too far out. Then you have the maximum duration. So the maximum duration right now is 24 hours. You may say, you know what, that's going to monopolize that room. Let's say the maximum duration's going to be four hours, and here's an automatic reply to be sent to meeting organizers. So it lets them know that this particular room has been booked. So I added in that this room has been reserved. Then the really important part here is the automatically accept and decline meeting requests. So that way no one has to log in with this resource mailbox to accept any type of request to reserve it. By checking that box, that keeps you from having to do that. And now here you can set up who is allowed to do it. So by default, everyone's going to be allowed to do it, but if you change your mind, then you can specify specific people to be able to go and reserve that type of meeting. We'll click Next and click Create. At this time, there is no charge for creating a resource mailbox, although Microsoft said that may change in the future. And there is my East Conference room all ready to go. I'm going to do the same thing, but with an equipment resource. Equipment resources would be things like projectors, televisions, other things where there's only a limited supply of a specific resource that you want to be able to allow people to reserve. So I'll just call this one Projector and I'll give it the name of Projector. Choose the domain name, click Next. And I'm just going to say we just have one of those. I'm going to leave the rest blank as they are. I'm also going to leave the rest of these options just as they are here now, which are very similar to creating the conference room that I had just done earlier. And I'll click Create and click Done. And I'll refresh. And there's our projector all ready to be reserved. I'm going to go in as the admin and I'm going to go to my calendar and I want to reserve these particular resources for a future date. And inside my calendar, let's say I'm going to choose a nine o'clock appointment. I'm going to put a title of reserve room for meeting, and I'm going to invite the conference room, so it automatically adds that time to the conference room in case anybody else tries to reserve that room. It will say that it's already going to be used by other people. You can also go ahead and add the other contacts you'd like to be in this particular meeting. I'm going to choose Send, and now I've reserved that room. And I can do the same thing with the projector as well. So I'll just type in need projector, invite, choose the projector from the list, invite the other people if I need to, and click Send. And now that's also scheduled. When other users go in to possibly reserve the projector, let's just go ahead and create a new meeting. I'm going to go to Scheduling Assistant. It's going to show on their calendar as well as mine that this time is already being reserved for these particular resources, so that way they know they can't use them, unless of course there's more than one of those resources. Resource mailboxes make reserving limited resources easy in Exchange Online.