Microsoft 365 : SharePoint online – Meeting / Conference room availability check – Setting up room mailbox

Hi All,

Greetings for the day !!!

Today bit different topic, new learning for me so sharing.

Use Case : In one of our Microsoft 365 intranet application we have requirement of checking slots available for Meeting room and if available then users / employees can book the meeting room

Background :

• My customer have around 500 + users in organization. They have meeting room and manually request to book meeting room for the conferences / meetings
• So our admin person was tracking manually each and every slot
• Whenever new requests were coming for booking, admin person need to check slots explicitly and then need to give confirmations
• And hence the requirement born – is there any possibility that user can directly check without approaching to admin person

Approach / Solution :

• There in concept called – Room mailboxes
• Using Room mailboxes – mailbox is assigned to physical location like – conference room, meeting room, training room or auditorium
• Using Room mailboxes our users can reserve these rooms by including room mailboxes in meeting requests
• These rooms are added to meetings by including them either in Attendee or Location fields

Creating Room mailbox :

• Navigate to Exchange admin center – either through direct url – https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/#/ or from Microsoft 365 admin center

• As we redirected to “Exchange admin center”
• From left pane, under “Recipients” click on “Resources” – Exchange admin center => Recipients => Resources

• On “Resources” page from right pane click on “+ Add a room resource” link as shown in above fig

• New right pane will open where we will create mailbox for room and update few basic settings
• One of the important setting I’ll like to highlight here is “Automatically accept/decline meeting request“
• By default, it’ll automatically accept or decline requests depending on whether the requests conflict with any existing meetings on its calendar.

• Please update the setting as per our organization need and on last screen click on “Create” button
• If Room mailbox created successfully we will see the status as shown in below screen

• On Resources page we can see our Room mailbox

• As Room mailbox created successfully, we can use respective mail id in invities of Outlook as
• Here we can see the availability of respective resource – Room

• We could also send the meeting invitation to respective resource and we will get reply back either – accepted or declined

• If there is no conflict then we will get “accepted” mail otherwise “declined”

• In “Declined” mail it also shows the conflict details as shown in below email

Thanks for reading the article !!! Please feel free to discuss in case any issues / suggestions / thoughts / questions

HAVE A GREAT TIME AHEAD !!!