Changing an Exchange User Mailbox to a Resource

Creating a resource mailbox in Exchange Server is easy. And it can make managing your organization’s resources — conference rooms, projectors, etc. — real easy, especially in avoiding double-booking.

But what if you accidentally create your resource mailbox as a user, instead? You can’t set it to auto-accept invitations, creating a management nightmare as each one has to be manually accepted on your resource’s calendar.

You can change the type of the account, but no one — Microsoft included — makes it easy to find out how! Here’s my humble effort to change that…

If you create your resource using the New-Mailbox, you simply specify “-Room” as one of the arguments, and Bam! you have yourself a room resource.

But what if you forget that part?

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-Mailbox confroom |fl *resource*

IsResource       : False
ResourceCapacity :
ResourceCustom   : {}
ResourceType     :

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-MailboxCalendarSettings confroom

AutomateProcessing                  : AutoUpdate

Well, that won’t do — we want AutoAccept, not AutoUpdate; the latter puts meeting invites in the “Tentative” state, while the former actually accepts them, which is what we want. But we can’t change it to AutoAccept because it’s not a resource!

Okay, well, New-Mailbox uses the “-Room” parameter, so all we need to do is to use Set-Mailbox with that parameter, right?

Wrong. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they don’t need consistency. So how do you do it?

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Set-Mailbox confroom -type room
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Set-MailboxCalendarSettings confroom -AutomateProcessing:AutoAccept

Easy, huh? Wouldn’t it have been easier, though, if Microsoft had embraced the very simple philosophy of consistency?