Exchange 2010 holiday calendar with delegate approval

After a recent migration from dedicated to hosted Exchange 2010 we needed to provide solutions for a few shared public folder calendars, one of which was used for booking holiday. The solution was a resource mailbox with the addition of delegate approval.

This should work with any Exchange 2010 service that supports remote PowerShell access.

The mailbox can be easily created in ECP, although I chose to use PowerShell. I also created a distribution group for the delegates, don’t forget to add members.

New-Mailbox –Name “Holiday” –Room

New-DistributionGroup –Name HolidayAdmins | Set-DistributionGroup -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

I then setup the calendar processing parameters.

Set-CalendarProcessing –Identity “Holiday” –ResourceDelegates “HolidayAdmins”

Set-CalendarProcessing –Identity “Holiday” –AllBookInPolicy $false –AllRequestInPolicy $true –AutomateProcessing AutoAccept –AdditionalResponse “Holiday request has been submitted. Confirmation will be sent separately.” –EnforceSchedulingHorizon $false –AllowConflicts $true

Users can now book holiday by adding the Holiday resource to meeting. Members of the distribution group (managers/HR) will receive a delegated meeting request which can be accepted or declined.

Daniel Noakes