As an administrator of M365 you may be required that Only Specific Users Can Reserve a Resource in Exchange. Normally a room or resource would be for the entire organization to reserve and the only things stopping them from booking it would be its availability. Other things like room capacity, equipment resources in the room, working hours, etc., can also be a factor.

However, sometimes the room might be an office used by one person but they need the ability for a group of users (maybe members in the department) to be able to book it like a resource. I will show you how to enable this through PowerShell.

You thought you only had to worry about a calendars working hours…

How Only Specific Users Can Reserve a Resource in Exchange

When you initially set up a resource mailbox, it processes meeting requests from all users. What if you need to restrict it to specific users?

We can use PowerShell for this:

Logon to Exchange Online (Connect-ExchangeOnline), then issue the command below.

Set-Mailbox -Identity “[email protected]” -AcceptMessagesOnlyFrom “usern[email protected] ″,”[email protected] ″,”[email protected]”

AcceptMessagesOnlyFrom is used for specifying what users can send to email addresses and distribution groups. However, a resource has a mail box so why not use it to specify who can book meetings. You can’t hide the resource and only notify only the users who you want to use it so this is the next best thing!

The “Only specific users can book the resource” by sending meeting requests requirement is satisfied. The resource mailbox automatically process the meeting requests by accepting or rejecting depending upon availability.

A pretty neat hack if I do say so myself. Sometimes it takes a little digging but you can find out different ways to use what M365 already has available, you can pretty much accomplish anything you need to properly administer your M365 tenant.

Happy IT’ing

Dan

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Dan

I am an IT professional with over twenty years experience in the field. I have supported thousands of users over the years. The organizations I have worked for range in size from one person to hundreds of people. I have performed support from Help Desk, Network / Cloud Administration, Network Support, Application Support, Implementation and Security.