title: Accessing Custom Resource Properties of a Resource Mailbox in Active Directory
body: <p>(This post is referencing Exchange 2010 but the capability of resource mailboxes was introduced in Exchange 2007)</p>
  
  <p>Exchange allows you to create different types of mailboxes for conference rooms - resource mailboxes - and assign custom properties to them, e.g. "Whiteboard", "A/V".  These  properties appear to be boolean, e.g. a conference room either has a whiteboard or not.  You can assign these to a mailbox in the Exchange 2010 Management console (or in the Shell).</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to figure out how to programmatically access these properties. It doesn't appear that the Exchange Web Services API was intended for this, as all underlying data ends up being stored in Active Directory. </p>
  
  <p>For example, one of the properties unique to a conference room mailbox is Resource Capacity, and you can grab that from Active Directory as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>child.Properties["msExchResourceCapacity"]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Where "child" represents a DirectoryEntry object as you're iterating through the contents of an Active Directory ou. </p>
  
  <p>After browsing the Active Directory Schema at <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms675085(VS.85).aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms675085(VS.85).aspx</a>, nothing jumped at me. </p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>