Inviting Outlook Resources

If your Exchange Server is configured with room or equipment resources capable of auto-accepting calendar invitations then you can configure QReserve to automatically invite these resources and help keep Outlook resource calendars in sync with QReserve.

Necessary Exchange Settings

The configuration and setup of resources in exchange is beyond this documentation and should be performed by your organization's IT staff; however, there are 2 key settings that are required for QReserve to successfully invite resources automatically:

1. Resources in Exchange must be setup to automatically accept invitations.
2. Resources must have the ProcessExternalMeetingMessages flag set to True. This option may be off by default and requires access to the Powershell to enable with a command such as:

Set-CalendarProcessing room-email@yourorg.com -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True

Verifying Settings

You can check the current status or verify your settings by running:

Get-CalendarProcessing -Identity "room-email@yourorg.com" | Format-List

Troubleshooting

If the Set-CalendarProcessing or Get-CalendarProcessing cmdlets are not available you may need to authenticate and import them. Doing so for Office 365 can be done with:

$UserCredential = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSession $Session

For managing modern Microsoft 365 Exchange servers you can use the exchangeonlinemanagement module like so before running commands:

Install-module exchangeonlinemanagement

Connect-exchangeonline

Setup in QReserve

Once Exchange is configured correctly, setup in QReserve is a breeze. Simply add your resource email address to the Email settings in the Reservations tab of your resource and QReserve will automatically send a meeting invitation whenever this room is booked. 

Important Notes

1. Invitations sent use the METHOD=REQUEST option in the calendar invite in order to request an acceptance or decline. This is a required option for Outlook and other calendar platforms to "accept" the meeting and add it to a calendar. The response is not captured by QReserve and will be ignored.

2. Recurring reservations are sent as separate emails with individual reservations. For example, a recurring reservation occurring once per week for a year will generate 52 email invites. This is to ensure that recurring reservations are handled correctly by different email platforms.

3. Updates or cancellations may or may not work in different platforms and software versions at this time.