How do I book a meeting room for an invite that has been sent to me

Copper Contributor

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?

 

11 Replies
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.

@Vasil Michev 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.

So I have enabled ProcessExternalMeetingMessages as per below PowerShell commands:

 

PS> Get-Mailbox "ourroom" | Get-CalendarProcessing |select ProcessExternalMeetingMessages

ProcessExternalMeetingMessages
------------------------------
False

 

PS> 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?

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.

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.

T

@TerryBen 
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.

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.

@Daniel Mare 

 

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