Outlook Tips--Organizing Resources

In Exchange 2000 Server, how can I set up resources so that users can see the resources relevant to their department, not all the conference rooms in the company?

Exchange 2000's address lists feature can help you organize resources or any other category of addresses. These address lists are essentially Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) queries that appear as separate listings in Outlook's address book.

You need to use one or more properties to distinguish resources from other users. For example, Figure 2 shows a resource user on my lab server. On the Organization tab of the resource's Properties dialog box, I entered Resource for the title. I also provided the department name to let users filter the address list by department.

To create an address list, open the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Exchange System Manager snap-in. Under Recipients, right-click All Address Lists and choose New, Address List. Give the list a name, and click Filter Rules to filter for only users with Exchange mailboxes. Then, add other criteria by using the properties that distinguish between resources and other users and between different departments. The filter can also limit the list to mailboxes in a particular server or Information Store (IS).

Figure 3 shows how I used the title and department information to build the filter criteria for an IT Resources address list. (Note that the filter uses Job Title, whereas the Organization tab labels the field Title.) You can click Find Now to see the matching mailboxes at the bottom, which makes it easy to check the criteria as you add them one by one. If you later need to change the filter for your address list, bring up its Properties dialog box again and on the General tab, click Modify.

You can also set security permissions on each address list so that only certain users can view the details of the list. By default, the Authenticated Users group has certain permissions on any address list—including List contents, List object, and Open Address List. To restrict access to the address list to a specific security group (e.g., all users in the IT department), bring up the properties for the address list and on the Security tab, clear the Allow inheritable permissions from parent to propagate to this object check box. Choose Remove when you're asked how you want to handle the inherited permissions on the object. Add the security group, and grant it the Open Address List permission. Other users will see the address list under All Address Lists, but only the security group will see the details of the resources that appear under that address list.