Sharing Office 365 Room's availability to external users
Published Mar 30 2018 07:37 PM 143K Views
Microsoft

You maybe sharing meeting rooms with your partners and they can use your room when it is not used. The following steps shows you how to share the room with people outside your company:

 

Preparation Steps (done by administrator)

1.  Add delegate access to people managing the room in your company

From Admin Center > Resources > Rooms & equipment, locate the room you would like to manage and edit Delegates to add the person in your company to share the room's calendar.

3_AddDelegate.PNG

 2. Edit exchange settings for the room and give the person a Full Access rights to the room

4_ExchangeSetting.PNG

 

Sharing Room's calendar (done by the room delegate)

1. From the delegate's account, switch to the room's account

Logon with delegate's account, navigate to the outlook calendar, then open the account (click the profile picture on the upper right corner). Click on "open another mailbox" option.

5_SwitchAccount.PNG

2. Search and select the room's account which has been delegated to

6_OpenRoomAccount.PNG

3. Navigate to the calendar and click Share

Enter the email address of the person to share (note: only Microsoft's email account including Office 365, outlook.com) and select the share option 

7_shareRoom.PNG

 

Viewing shared room's calendar 

1. The external user will receive an email invitation to view the calendar. Click accept and share calendar.

8_Email.PNG

2. Navigate to the calendar view to see the room's availability

9_calendar.PNG

33 Comments

So in other words we can share free/busy with consumer accounts now? Or is this only limited to @outlook.com accounts? And is it Room mailboxes only? What about other recipient types?

 

I did a quick test and I seem to be able to add the permissions on a room and a shared mailbox to a @gmail.com account, the link however takes me to https://calendar.live.com? So I guess it's only possible with outlook.com users?

Nevermind, got it working for shared mailboxes too. It seems to be just the good old Calendar Publishing though, so what's the new part? :)

Microsoft

Not new - but I have a customer asked me and I could not find an existing article on sharing resource calendar, so thought to share this info on a blog :)

Got it, thanks :) And yes, it's nice to have a detailed article on this.

Copper Contributor

Is this also supposed to work with accounts that are no Microsoft accounts? I tried it, but the room/calender on the other account stays empty.

Copper Contributor

Is there a long delay before you can add the Resource mailbox? I'm in my account on Office 365 in the browser and I've picked Open Another Mailbox but the resource mailbox for the resource I recently created isn't appearing. I'm assuming this is either a delay until it appears because the resource was recently created or you can't do this with resources as they don't use a licence?

Copper Contributor

I have a room calendar and when an outside person makes an meeting, it shows up on the calendar. But when they change the meeting, it does not reflect the new meeting time on the calendar. They can delete the meeting,

Copper Contributor

Never got this working. Made myself delegate and opened Outlook online but still can never "Open another mailbox" as it's never in the list.

Copper Contributor
Welly, Is it at all possible to share a resource "Room" Outside your org to another O365 Org? Can this be done via your steps above, but instead use an Office 365 group from the external org to process permissions to the resource? Or can this only be done individually? (Which I did get working, but would rather not manage permissions this way.) I already have my resources calendar set to process external reservation requests. My business case is that my company shares physical office space with another company (that has O365) and I want to share our resource cal with their Staff_Group@. Thanks!
Brass Contributor

@Patty Allison 

 

Just to confirm that your outside person can make a room booking and it populates the meeting room calendar? I have followed all the steps, but the outside person can only view the calendar as free/busy, but when they add the meeting room to their calendar invite or invite the meeting room as a user, it does not appear in the meeting room calendar. The outside person also tried to create a calendar entry from the meeting room calendar, but again it only populates the users calendar and not the meeting room calendar.

 

@Welly Lee can you offer any insights on the above?

 

 

 

 

Steel Contributor

I was wondering if this could possibly be done with Microsoft Bookings offering.

Brass Contributor

@Patty Allison do you have any feedback?

Brass Contributor

@Keira McCann, have you opened your resource mailbox to allow external to send mails to it?

You need to activate it with: Set-CalendarProcessing -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $true

 

@Robert Woods, how should you do this in Microsoft Bookings? Seems not to be a good solution in my eyes... Microsoft Bookings don´t have access to the resource mailbox and then you first need to book your "meeting" in Bookings and then send a proper invite to the users that should be a part of the meeting.

Brass Contributor

@Martin Front thanks for the feedback, unfortunately our security protocols dont allow us to open the resource mailbox to allow external to send mail, I was hoping there was another way as the external users can now View the calendar!

Copper Contributor

@Daniel Watson Did you ever receive a response to your question on this thread? I have a similar situation of wanting to share our room resources with a company next door who we work closely with and want to allow easy use of our rooms. 

 

Thank you

Copper Contributor

@Welly Lee Is there a response somewhere to Daniel Watson's question about Organizational level sharing, I have a very similar situation and am interested in any potential solutions. 

 

Thank you,

 

Josh

Copper Contributor

@Welly Lee - There is a growing list of people whose company is sharing office space with another company and want to share the room resource.  As office sharing is booming, this is a growing issue.  Can you please answer @Daniel_Watson and @Joshua950?  I have the same question.

 

(Meanwhile, as a footnote, this is my first message on this forum - in which I am condemned to operate in US English.  As an Aussie born in Britain, I shall no doubt confuse the community with the correct spelling of words such as "colour" and "summarise".  But then, you drive on the wrong side of the road too!  :cryingwithlaughter:  Have fun all!)

 

Cheers. :cool:

Copper Contributor

I wonder when this long awaited problem gets solved. Sharing room resources is a growing trend.

Copper Contributor

echo others who cant get this working.

 

I've enabled OrganisationSharing in Office365 Org settings, as well as Set-CalendarProccessing powershell command, but not joy. When I try to book an external room by typing the external rooms email, it doesnt appear and not recognized. 

Brass Contributor

Does anyone have any success with a shared room between two companies?

Copper Contributor

I have a organizasion sharing between 2 Office 365 tenants sharing one office.

The other organization are able to book the rooms in our tenant if they add the room manually to a meeting.

The rooms are added as mailcontacts, is there a way to make the rooms show up in their roomfinder?

Copper Contributor

I was fighting this issue several months ago. As far as I remember, calendar can be shared to all anonymous users, and then with an Exchange transport rule, can be limited to certain upn suffix for example. But this way people can only book and cannot edit current meetings.

Copper Contributor

looking for a solution as well to allow other 'tenants' to utilize room finder to find our conference rooms.

Copper Contributor

@Keira McCann You can lock it down via Mail Flow Rules.  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYxhOUS4DGQ

 

Unfortunately, the problem I am having is once shared out, the shared Rooms calendar will not update when someone makes a booking.  When you are paying $20 a license per month per conference room you'd think Microsoft would be able to sort these issues.

 

I have got a work around to my problem by sharing a weblink to the calendar, but that's not ideal.  But it will have to do for now.

 

Copper Contributor

@kmcgraw you should be able to achieve this through Federation of domains and creating organization relationships in O365.  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/sharing/organization-relationships/create-an-organization-...

Copper Contributor

@TheGeodan we have this organizational sharing on.... but the rooms still don't show up in room list for the other tenants.  i feel like there is another step that is unknown...

Copper Contributor

@kmcgraw did you solve this problem somehow?

Copper Contributor

@JakubW96 unfortunately i have been told by microsoft that this cannot happen.  

Copper Contributor

so calendars cannot be shared accross tenants even with cross tenant sharing enabled.  

Copper Contributor

Does anyone know if an external user can be added as a delegate of a room?

Copper Contributor

With the Org sharing you can book meeting but you have to manually add the meeting rooms full address to the "Required" section, if you then click on the shceduling assistant you can see the Free/Busy times.

This works ok, but it would be good if Rooms could be shared as well so they can be looked up in the room finder.

 

you have to enable external processing as mentioned above, we have done this but then created a mail flow rule to only allow emails to the meeting rooms from specific domains.

Copper Contributor

Same problems as anyone else still not fixed

Copper Contributor

Per this (not very satisfactory) answer from Microsoft, room resources within a tenant cannot be made available in "Room Finder" for a shared tenant.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/get-external-room-to-show-up-in-room-finder/0...

 

Microsoft will need to implement a change to tenant account management for this to work in the future.

Version history
Last update:
‎Mar 30 2018 07:37 PM
Updated by: