Applies to: Exchange Server 2010 SP3, Exchange Server 2010 SP2

Topic Last Modified: 2011-03-19

In Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 or earlier, if you wanted to search for a conference room's availability while setting up a meeting, you needed to add all possible conference rooms to the meeting request, and then use the Scheduling Assistant to view available conference rooms.

In Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, you can create room list distribution groups to generate a list of building locations so that Outlook 2010 users can select a building and get information about room availability without having to manually add all the rooms in the building.

You can only add room mailboxes to a room list distribution group.

Looking for other management tasks related to distribution groups? Check out Managing Distribution Groups.

Use the Shell to create a room list distribution group

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Distribution groups" entry in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

Note:
You can't use the EMC to create a room list distribution group.

This example creates a room list for all of the conference rooms in Building 31 by using the Filter parameter. In this example, CustomAttribute1 is used to specify that the conference rooms are in Building 31.

  1. Save the list of members in a $Members variable.

    Copy Code 
    $Members=Get-Mailbox -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq "RoomMailbox") -and (CustomAttribute1 -eq "Building 31")}
  2. Create the distribution group by using the $Members variable as the value for the Members parameter.

    Copy Code 
    New-DistributionGroup -Name "Building 31 Conference Rooms" -OrganizaitonalUnit "contoso.com/rooms" -RoomList -Members $Members

For detailed syntax and parameter reference, see Get-Mailbox and New-DistributionGroup.