Forum Discussion
How do I book a meeting room for an invite that has been sent to me
We use room resource calendars for our room bookings. Usually we just add the meeting room into the location field or even as a participant and it books the room.
When we get meeting invitations from external parties not in our organisation (e.g. suppliers) that will visit us, we'd like to book a meeting room for that visit. How do we do this?
The only way we can currently do this is by creating our own duplicate calendar entry for the meeting and choose that room as the location, but we'd like to find a more integrated way, rather than having two separate unlinked calendar entries. With separate calendar entries, if the external meeting initiator changes meeting time, we have to manually change our own related calendar entry which we forget to do resulting in room being booked for wrong time.
Any solutions or suggestions to help with this problem?
Daniel Mare It is way easier than it seems:
1. Open the invitation you have in Outlook;
2. Hit "Forward" in the ribbon;
3. In "To" fill in the name of your meeting room;
4. Hit "Submit"
If the meeting room is available it will automatically accept your invitation and the room will booked for you.
Hope this helps.
RiccardoBrama, one would think it is that simple. However it does not work most of the time and it is also impossible to use the scheduling assistant or see if the meeting room is available unless you go an create a separate meeting just to see if the room is available.
wazzacpt to see room availability I use its calendar on Outlook
- It's 4 years later but the only improvement I can find in all of this time is that Outlook Online (which we don't use) has a neat feature that allows you to duplicate a meeting. Two clicks to duplicate - delete all of the attendees, add the room and send.
All of the problems you mentioned with duplicated meeting still exist, but if you're duplicating meetings 4 years later while STILL waiting for Microsoft to fix this then this (new?) duplicate meetings feature (only in Outlook Online, sadly) is great 🙂 - As with the others, this seems like such an obvious thing to want to be able to do.
Creating a duplicate calendar entry is definitely not the way to go if you have teams AV integrated as my company does, as the meeting room AV then knows nothing about the meeting organizer's invite.As it's a duplicate - everything about the original invite (including the Team meeting details) is duplicated in the, well, duplicate. Before you save it, just delete all of the other attendees - they don't need to know anything about your duplicate - that's just for the meeting room AV system.
InaurukunThis is not constructive. We are expressly saying that creating a copy of the meeting is not what should happed. It is a work around hack until such time as Microsoft fix the problem.
You should be able to simply forward the original meeting from the external person to your meeting room that is already setup in the tenant. You should not have to set every possible person that contacts you as a guest on the tenant to be able to forward the request to the meeting room.
Perhaps think and read before posting.Our IT team has tested out a few of the options previously suggested and there is clearly an issue from Microsoft side. When enabling the ability to for external meetings to be accepted by the tenant, it still does not work unless you add the external person's tenant/domain as a guest on your tenant. This is clearly a bug or shortfall in system design.
If you have the correct access to the meeting rooms calendar, open the calendars in split view and drag and drop a copy of the appointment from your calendar
- In 2024 has anyone found a solution to this issue?
- nope, no easy way... I end up creating a separate meeting to book the room. Then I manually connect the room to the online meeting, we use zoom, so it is a 7-9 digit to be input in a tablet, not the end of the world but with Google calendar it was literally just hitting on "Join". On this, Google calendar does a really good job in comparison, sorry MS.
Same question
- Has anyone ever come up with a solution to this problem. My company struggles with this issue. Not all people can always get their head around the convoluted process that exist now.
There must be a smoother way.
TTerryBen
The solution is not ideal. You can have external senders as guests or contacts in your Exchange environment OR allow external booking (ProcessExternalMeetingMessages: TRUE) OR allow external booking and create a transport rule like if received from 'Outside the organization' then reject the message expect if 'X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthAs' header matches pattern 'Internal' meaning that rooms will not automatically process updates including cancelation.
So I have enabled ProcessExternalMeetingMessages as per below PowerShell commands:
PS> Get-Mailbox "ourroom" | Get-CalendarProcessing |select ProcessExternalMeetingMessages
ProcessExternalMeetingMessages
------------------------------
FalsePS> Get-Mailbox "ourroom" | Set-CalendarProcessing -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True
PS> Get-Mailbox "ourroom" | Get-CalendarProcessing |select ProcessExternalMeetingMessages
ProcessExternalMeetingMessages
------------------------------
True
Now when external parties invites me to a meeting and I forward this meeting onto a meeting room resource calendar, it accepts the events and replies "accept" to meeting originator, however, I have no indication myself that the event had been accepted by the meeting room calendar.If I forward it onto the meeting room - the room does not become a participant in my calendar.
If I forward it onto the meeting room AND myself - the room becomes a participant in my calendar, but it says that the meeting room "didn't respond", despite it having responded to the initiator.
I thus have no confirmation whether the meeting room has been successfully booked or whether it was declined due to an existing booking or other policy.
How can I get the resource room calendar to reply to all participants including myself that the room has "accepted" the meeting?
- I really cannot believe that Microsoft have not prioritised correcting this type of problem. It is a major issue. Lets not even mention how difficult it is to chat to users on Teams outside of your organisation.
- I need to have the availability of the meeting room as part of the Booking, and then of course book the meeting room when external user creates a booking. I can't use this solution for local meetings if I can't attach a meeting room to the meeting.
Only the organizer will receive the booking notification, however you can simply look at the meeting room's calendar and see whether it's booked successfully. You cannot have two events, one in your calendar and one in the external organizer ones updated simultaneously, if that's what you are after.
- Same problem, would like to know a solution for this. Liek forwarding the external meeting invite to an internal meeting room?
Forwarding/adding recipients should do. You can also allow external people to book your rooms, but you will still have to work with them through the process I suppose.
VasilMichev I tried forwarding the meeting request onto the meeting rooms. This works for internally initiated meetings, but when I forward on external meeting invitations, it just sits in the room resource calendar's Inbox, unprocessed.
