What's the "right" way to create a shared calendar in Exchange Server 2007 ? To meet our requirements, we need to jump through a lot of hoops, and I have to think we're missing something obvious.The goal is to have a shared calendar (My_Calendar) whose permissions are specified by AD security groups, e.g. the Owners are the members of the My_Calendar_Owners security group, the reviewers are in My_Calendar_Reviewers, etc. These AD security groups should not be mail-enabled, if possible. At the very least, the person(s) responsible for the calendar should be in the My_Calendar_Owners group.Heres what I think needs to be done: Create a room mailbox for the shared calendar, for the sake of having automated message handling Create the new mail-enabled security groups (My_Calendar_Owners, My_Calendar_Authors, etc.); we don't really want these groups to be mail-enabled, but calendar permissions can only (?) be assigned by selecting objects in the GAL. Update the GAL so that you can use the new groups in the calendar's permissions. To set permissions on the new calendar, you need Full Access permissions to the mailbox, so you need to give them to yourself, at least temporarily. Once thats done, you can open the shared calendar from your own Outlook session and adjustits permissions. Of course, if youre running in Cached Exchange Mode, you need to download the offline address book to update your GAL with those new mail-enabled security groups! If you want to adjust the Free/Busy permissions (particularly for Anonymous and/or Default), you can't do this from your own Outlook session. You mustlog in to the calendar mailbox:closeyour Outlook session, create a new mail profile, and re-open Outlook, usingthe calendar mailbox's profileinstead of your own. If you dont want these security groups to remain mail-enabled,because they are not really intended for mailing, hide them from address lists. Give the My_Calendar_Owners group Read Members + Write Members permission to the other groups (_Reviewers, _Authors, whatever), so that the owners of the calendar can change the memberships of the calendar's security groups. Is it really this complicated, or am I making it more difficult than it needs to be?..Jeff

Hi Jeff, I think the method you provided is an appropriate method to create shared calendar. According to following article: Resource scheduling in Exchange Server 2007 http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/05/14/438944.aspx In the How to Set a Delegate on a Resource Mailbox section, we either provide Full Access Permissions to a user by using following command: Add-MailboxPermission Resource1 -AccessRights:fullaccess -User:Delegate1 Or create an Outlook profile for the resource mailbox and grant appropriate permission to the calendar folder. Mike

I see that you can give FullAcces (and I'd guess SendAs) permissions on a mailbox by using the Add-MailboxPermission command, and that's somewhat helpful. What's profoundly frustrating is that there doesn't appear to be any way to set permissions on the *calendar* from the shell. What I'm looking for is a way, for example, to give User1"Reviewer" permissions on the calendar for Resource1 without having to open the calendar from Outlook. Beyond that, I'd like to be able to give "Anonymous" and "Default" the ability to read Free/Busy information on Resource1 without having to open the mailbox from an alternate mail profile in Outlook. I don't think there's any way to do that from the shell. If I could set the calendar permissions and Free/Busy access from the shell, then this arduous process could be automated. Is it really not possible to do so?

Hi Jeff, 1. By default, the Default group has permission to review Free/Busy time 2. I think that isn't any specific command could grant folder level permission to a specific user, Add-MailboxPermission can only work in mailbox level, it cannot work in folder level. Therefore, I suggest you can try to use the PFDAVAdmin tool to set Calendar permission. PFDavAdmin tool http://www.msexchange.org/articles/PFDavAdmin-tool-Part1.html Or you can refer to following two articles: Setting and Understanding Folder Permissions in Exchange Web Services http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2008/01/setting-and-understanding-folder.html Setting Folder-Level Permissions (Exchange Web Services) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb856574.aspx Mike