If any of this fails, we throw an error and exit the script:
So next we try to create an object, connect to Outlook and get a list of all the rooms we gave ourselves access to above. The Application object is the root object of the Outlook object model, and represents the entire Outlook application. In order for us to manipulate Outlook, first we need to have access to Outlook’s object library. To start with, we define a couple of parameters that will delimit the period of time for which we want to analyze the rooms for, such as a month, a whole year, or anything we want:Īll Microsoft Office applications support automation, the ability of a program to expose itself to, for example, VBA or PowerShell in this case, so that PowerShell can control it. Once we have access to all the meeting rooms we want to process, we just need to open Outlook and ensure their mailboxes appear on the left hand side: To give ourselves access to the meeting room mailbox(s), we can use the Exchange Admin Center or PowerShell through the following cmdlet:Īdd-MailboxPermission -User -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
This is an issue that EWS simply does not have, so if you have many rooms to gather data from, EWS is highly recommended. In this case, what I recommend is to do them in batches of 25. This is not a big problem when we want to analyze a few rooms, but it becomes a problem when we have dozens and dozens of rooms, or even hundreds. There is a drawback however… Because it uses Outlook, the meeting room(s) we want to gather data from need to be added in Outlook as an additional mailbox. Although EWS is always my preferred option, this time I will use Outlook to keep the script simpler to explain and understand. Since the Exchange built-in cmdlets do not provide us with the information we need, for this script we basically have two options: we either use Exchange Web Services (EWS) or use Outlook to gather this information.
In this article we will develop a script to provide us with some of this information and to serve as a stepping stone to gather further information depending on the reader’s particular needs. This information can show how often certain rooms are utilized, the average meeting duration, who tends to book more meetings, and so on. In certain cases, having statistical information about these rooms helps organizations plan or redesign their offices in a more efficient way. After an administrator creates room mailboxes, users can easily reserve rooms by including room mailboxes in meeting requests, providing a simple and efficient way of organizing meetings for users.įor several Exchange versions now that room mailboxes have been available and some organizations make extensive use of them for all their meeting room bookings. A room mailbox is a resource mailbox that is assigned to a physical location, such as a conference room, an auditorium or a training room for example. Exchange has several different types of mailboxes, one of them being room mailboxes.
0 kommentar(er)
