HOW TO: Create Address Lists for Equipment Mailboxes

Exchange Server 2007 lets you create room and equipment mailboxes. Having these designated as resource mailboxes - either room or equipment - has its advantages as these get setup for resource booking without having to go through the cumbersome process of logging into such mailboxes and configuring calendar settings for each so they can be booked as resources.

Whereas an "All Rooms" Address List is created by default, equipment mailboxes are not listed in it, and there's no separate Address List for equipment. (Thanks to the person who asked this question in this morning's Exchange Q&A chat on TechNet!)

Additional Address Lists can be created easily for such equipment mailboxes.

To create an "All Equipment" Address List, use the following command in Exchange shell:

New-AddressList -name "All Equipment" -RecipientFilter {RecipientType -eq "UserMailbox" -and RecipientTypeDetails -eq "EquipmentMailbox"}

To view the mailboxes that get picked up by the above filter, use the following commands:

$AllEquipment = Get-AddressList "All Equipment"
Get-Recipient -filter $AllEquipment.RecipientFilter

You can also create more granular Address Lists, for example one for all projectors.

For this example, we follow a naming convention for naming equipment mailboxes for projectors, so it has a particular string like PROJ. In this case, our mailboxes follow a naming convention that results in projector mailboxes names like EQP-PROJ-InFocus1. You are free to make your own naming convention choices, this is just an example. Now we can use the following command to create an "All Projectors" Address List:

New-AddressList "All Projectors" -RecipientFilter {RecipientType -eq "UserMailbox" -and "RecipientTypeDetails -eq "EquipmentMailbox" -and name -like "*PROJ*"}

Now we have separate Address Lists for equipment resources, and also one for all projectors. This allows users to easily locate these resources using Address Lists when scheduling meetings.