Auto Accept Agent

Now that the majority (almost 700) of our users are off groupWise and on Exchange 2003, manually handling calendars for Resources such as conference rooms is becoming a pain.

First, I looked at setting this in Outlook 2003, but found it too intensive based on the requirement to set permissions for each user that is going to send appointments to the resource and the Outlook client must be running (so one might have a dedicated desktop running Outlook with all resources).

Next, I looked at Exchange server auto accept agent . It's a COM application that runs on your Exchange server and handles the auto accept on it's own. Plus side is that it doesn't use Free/Busy generation to search scheduling, so it's faster, and also the resource doesn't have to be added to the meeting as a resource (. i.e. it still works if a users adds the recourse in the TO: field). Negatives are that you have a single XML configuration file that will apply to all Exchange accounts you configure to auto accept, so no configuration options down to the mailbox level and you must also set some AD values and permissions for it to work. (Although they supply a cscript to make this a little easier).

Check out the documentation here .