Centrally administered Calendar sharing in Exchange 2010

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Sometimes it is needed to fully provision a mailbox with all the correct settings and permissions the user needs. For instance, it can be necessary to share your calendar with everyone in your department and vice versa. Normally you would be dependent on everyone to share their calendar. Quite troublesome

This issue can be easily addressed by using the *-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlets within Exchange 2010.

Using Get-MailboxFolderPermission you can view the various permissions already set on folders within a mailbox. For instance:

Get-MailboxFolderPermission -identity "dmstork:\Agenda"

Will show something like this:

RunspaceId   : 3afd19b8-a0f5-49c3-824f-123456789xxx
FolderName   : Agenda
User         : Jos Haarbos
AccessRights : {Reviewer}
Identity     : Jos Haarbos
IsValid      : True

You can see that user Jos Haarbos has Reviewer permissions on the calendar of dmstork.

Use Add-MailboxFolderPermission to add user permissions to the preferred folder. In this case “Agenda” and the user Administrator will receive Reviewer permissions:

Add-MailboxFolderPermission -identity "dmstork:\Agenda" –user Administrator -AccessRights Reviewer

You can add and remove permissions on every folder within a mailbox. The calendar is just a folder in a mailbox, a bit special, but a folder not the least. But there are some things to consider.

The name of the Calendar folder is determined by the language the user defined (first logon with Outlook/OWA). That can be an issue when you have an multi-lingual organization. In the above example the dutch word for “Calendar” is “Agenda”.

There are ways to force all mailboxes in one language. See links at the bottom.

You cannot add permissions via groups, but when you are handy with Powershell there are ways to script this (I’m thinking: read distribution group membership, for next loop, add permission). Add that to your create user script or in a scheduled user/recipient maintenance script and users will be happy!

 

Further reading:

Checking Exchange 2010 Mailbox Calendar Permissions…

Get-MailboxFolderPermission

Add-MailboxFolderPermission

Remove-MailboxFolderPermission

Language setup for a mailbox with Exchange Server 2007 (works basically the same for Exchange 2010)

Change the Languages for a User Mailbox

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