Preventing double booked appointments in Outlook

Question

At our organization we use a series of shared Outlook calendars to schedule out our conference rooms. All domain users are setup as authors of these calenders. We are now running into a problem where the end user is either not checking/caring if a room already has an appointment assigned to the room for the period of time that they want to use it. So my question is this: Is there any way to prevent a user from scheduling an appointment or meeting on one of these calendars when there is already a preexisting one on it?

We've already tried going into Options -> Resource Scheduling and checking "Automatically decline conflicting meeting requests," but this did not resolve the issue.

Answer 1

I'd recommend that you set up your conference rooms as resources. You can then use resource booking to prevent this from happening. Have a look at this article from MSExchange.org for Exchange 2003.

Here are articles for Exchange 2007 for making Resource Mailboxes.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Answer 2

I believe you would have to set these up as shared resources (Resource Mailboxes in 2007) and use the "Invite" feature rather than giving users the ability to directly schedule appointments in the calendar. Then your Resource Scheduling options would apply.

Answer 3

If they are already not looking at the meeting responses coming back from the resources (I think that's what you are describing) what do you want to have happen when the response comes back declined? I think this is more of a user education issue than a technical one. That being said, exchange has a whole event sink architecture you can hook into. It involves writing code but you can do pretty much anything you want.