I'm managing room and resource mailboxes in Microsoft 365, and I'm trying to achieve a few straightforward goals:
- Make a room calendar visible to all users in both Outlook and Teams.
- Allow users to view the free/busy status.
- Ideally, let users see who booked the room when it's busy, without showing all the meeting details.
However, I'm hitting some roadblocks:
- Full visibility for room calendars doesn't seem to be supported.
- Teams appears to ignore the calendar permissions altogether.
- Outlook can sometimes show the organizer, but that depends on specific settings.
- Teams won't display who booked the room at all, just the busy/free status.
Am I overlooking something obvious here, or is this really a limitation of the product? I'm curious how other organizations manage room transparency without converting rooms into shared mailboxes and disrupting booking. Would love to hear how others handle this or if Microsoft has provided any reasoning behind these restrictions.
4 Answers
Getting room calendars to show properly is all about setting the right permissions. If you adjust the permissions correctly on the room calendars, it should work fine. For showing who booked the room, users need to book it with the 'private' flag if they want to hide details from others. Otherwise, everyone can see the invite details.
I faced a similar problem with our Teams Rooms not displaying booking information like the meeting name or organizer. I managed to sort it by setting the room calendars to 'Public' using Exchange Online PowerShell. Now, for our open meeting rooms, when you check their calendars in Outlook, you can see the meeting title and organizer. Not sure how the same reflects in Teams, though.
We created a workflow with Excel that addresses common questions about rooms and generates all the necessary PowerShell commands to configure settings for the rooms, including making free/busy visibility available. It’s quite handy to streamline setup and fixes.
I've never had issues with this. Can you clarify how you're trying to set it up? From what I know, it should be straightforward. For example, you can use a command like Set-MailboxFolderPermission -identity [room upn]:calendar -user default -accessrights reviewer. Just remember that if the organizer sets the invite as 'private', others won't see any details.
You can automate this using calendar processing. This way, it will remove the subjects from the room's calendar and add the name of the user who booked the room. You just need to run a command like this: set-calendarProcessing -identity [email protected] -DeleteSubject -AddOrganizerToSubject.