Converting Exchange 2003 conference rooms to Exchange 2010

I’m wrapping up moving mailboxes to Exchange 2010. The last ones to be moved (except for BlackBerry users… thanks BES) are the conference rooms. So the first step was to move them using the Local Move tool, which was pretty simple. But I don’t want them in 2010 as user mailboxes if they can be designated as “rooms,” which they can. So here’s how I’m doing it:

Identify the mailboxes to be moved

Once you figure out the syntax for the “-Filter” flag to get-mailbox, this is easy

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>get-mailbox -filter { (RecipientTypeDetails -eq "UserMailbox") -and ( DisplayName -like "*conference*") }

Name                      Alias                ServerName       ProhibitSendQuota
----                      -----                ----------       -----------------
Conference Room2          ConferenceRoom2      exch2010be1      unlimited
Production Conference ... productionconf       exch2010be1      unlimited
Conference Room 1         conference1          exch2010be1      unlimited
L&D Conference Room       ldconference         exch2010be1      unlimited
Tech Conference Room      techconference       exch2010be1      unlimited
Client Services Confer... csconference         exch2010be1      unlimited
Suite 202 Conference Room 202conf              exch2010be1      unlimited

Convert them to rooms

As Microsoft says in this story about converting mailboxes to rooms, this can only be done via Exchange Management Shell (not EMC), so just pipe the output from the previous command to Set-Mailbox -Type Room:

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>get-mailbox -filter { (RecipientTypeDetails -eq "UserMailbox") -and ( DisplayName -like "*confe
rence*") } | set-mailbox -type room
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>

Done! Now when you create an appointment in Outlook 2007, in Scheduling Assistant, you can click the “Add Room” button to add a room. Hooray.