Exchange 2010 Conference Room Behavior

Before we start discussing about the changes in Exchange 2010 Conference Room
changes, lets start with Exchange 2003. Delegate & Auto Accept Conference Rooms
worked distinctly where the former one required a delegate to accept/decline
meeting requests based on availability and the latter accepts/declines automatically
without user intervention. Auto-Accept works on event sink basis, checks for the
free/busy information and then processes the request accordingly. Any user who is
aware of the Room Mailbox password can login as the mailbox to perform any kind of
an operation, which seemed to be vulnerable.
Now coming to Exchange 2010, the first change is all the Conference Mailbox AD
account is disabled by default i.e. user cannot login as the Room Mailbox account
anymore. Room mailbox types remains the same as in Exchange 2003, Delegate &
Auto Accept, however the way it works has a lot of changes. Room mailboxes have
new AD Property Tabs such as Resource General, Resource Policy, Resource
Information, Resource In-Policy Requests & Resource Out-of-Policy Requests.

Resource Mailbox Properties

Resource General
Allows you to configure custom resource properties and resource capacity value.
Resource Booking Attendant is also configured on this tab.
Resource Booking Attendant
Enables resources including meeting rooms or other equipment to be automatically
managed. Resources can auto-accept requests when available or decline and provide
details explaining the decline.

Resource Information
Controls the meeting information such as attachments, Comments, subject etc.,
allows the configuration for sending additional text message for the meeting
organizer.

Resource

Policy

Configure
specific
policies that
apply to the
resource
mailbox,
such as repeating meetings, reject repeating meetings that have an end date beyond
the booking window, maximum duration of a meetings & resource mailbox delegate.

Resource In-Policy Requests

Users who are allowed to submit In-Policy requests (meeting requests which meets
the Resource Policy configured) which can either be accepted automatically or
approved by a delegate
Resource Out-of-Policy Requests
Users who are allowed to submit Out-of-Policy requests (meeting requests which
deviates from the resource policy configured) needs to be approved by a delegate
PowerShell cmdlet to check if the Conference Room Mailbox is Delegated or
Auto-Accept
Get-CalendarProcessing identity <Mailbox Name>
The resultant should display the Head named AutomateProcessing set to AutoUpdate
incase of Delegated Conference Room and Auto-Accept incase of Auto-Accept
Conference Room
Most confusing part is, if the delegated conference room has been enabled with the
resource booking attendant feature, CalendarProcessing will be set to Auto-Accept