Corporate Meeting Resources in Office 365 in the Age of Social Distancing

So in the soda straw view of the world we see in calendaring, it was only a while before COVID-19 reared its protein-based heads in our direction.  (and yours, we assume!)

Specifically: how can we make sure we promulgate COVID-19 safety rules to personnel if we (when we) are allowed to authorize them to return to work in our physical locations?

Simplest way we came up with that does not involve any coding or need to involve your Office 365 Administrator is to create a Rule for your Resources, as shown in this screen capture.

The meeting organizer (and ONLY the meeting organizer) will then get an email directly from the resource in your standardized corporate language reminding them to observe safe meeting practices, as the following details show: 

This is the detail from Conference Room 222:

Easy-peasy.  And as you see it works whether you have your conference rooms as auto-accept or managed.

Do you have a zillion rooms?  This is script-able through Exchange Shell.  If you create a solution, please post it here and share it to benefit others!  

Conference Room Calendar Migration from Zimbra to Office 365

Our latest version of Zimbra to Office 365 calendar migration is also moving resource calendars fine.

So for instance a Zimbra resource calendar (Room_222), has a schedule that looks like this one week:

Comes into Office 365 looking like this:

Keep in mind this is also server-to-server so it's fast and much less hassle than going via PSTs.

Since this is a fast-flat migration we make this convenient on the side of the end user by including the information that the resource was booked in Zimbra.

Prevent Double-Bookings in Office 365 Calendar

We keep getting Office 365 sites coming the blog with search terms something like "prevent double bookings in 365 calendar."  

Invariably they find our post Double-Booked Meeting Rooms in Office 365 (and how to avoid them)

Let's keep in mind this is usually a problem for conference rooms.  People are double-booked all the time and it's expected.

Lots of technical info there, but as with anything in calendaring you need to also put it into a social context.

The only ways to prevent double-bookings entirely in advance and at meeting creation time are:

1. Disallow recurring bookings for resources
2. Set the allowable conflict rate to 0%
3. Make the resources go through a human gatekeeper

Now the social aspect of this:  Your users are probably going to balk at any of these.  And with good reason: 

1. Recurring meetings are just so darned useful. 
2. An allowable conflict rate of 0% is highly unrealistic
3. Having someone in charge of each resource defeats the purpose of calendaring

This is also a big issue because there is no easy mechanism for individuals to scan ahead and see if there is a possible conflict on the horizon with their meetings.  One of my daughters actually has this problem with a recurring meeting at her organization.

This is what makes double-booking a thorny problem. 

Our solution based on what we've seen is to create a PowerShell cmdlet that searches for up-coming resource conflicts and informs users or alternately takes action.

It's configurable and customize-able for a variety of situations.  Since it's a cmdlet it seems to be making more headway with on-prem Exchange sites, but it there's demand for something entirely cloud-based we're happy to discuss the issue.

October 2022: We just updated our cmdlet for Modern Authentication.