Add a Room Resource in Office 365 via this Simplified Guide
Employees within a company require a dedicated mechanism for sharing various assets such as a company vehicle, a conference hall, an electronic device, etc. To resolve this issue Microsoft came up with a solution called Room Resource. Although using a Room Resource is not difficult the real challenge is answering “How to Create a Room Resource in Office 365” especially for first-time users.
Therefore in this writeup, we provide a step-by-step guideline for setting up a Room Resource. Before diving into its creation process, let’s understand the essence of room resources in Office 365.
A Brief Introduction to Room Resource
A room resource is nothing but a schedule-based booking system. It creates digital representations of physical spaces (or equipment). These digital areas can then be booked through a personal work calendar. Moreover, as the room resource adds a mailbox of its own the person booking the space gets to send out an automated message.
Everything from resource name to the booking duration can be set up with a click of a few buttons. Additionally, resources can be in one of two categories: rooms or equipment. In our case, we chose a room. Overall Room Resource allows companies to avoid conflicts and work more seamlessly.
Related Information: Get the Stepwise Instructions On How to Create a Microsoft 365 Group Easily
How to Create a Room Resource in Office 365 Using Admin Center?
- Sign in to the EAC.
- On the left-hand pane expand Recipients and click on Resources
- Resources window opens up press the + icon with the text Add a resource.
- Set up room mailbox window pops up here you have to do the following task:
- Add a name as per the naming convention of your company.
- Assign a unique email address Once complete hit Next.
- In the General Information section configure the following options.
- Capacity: Indicates the upper limit of individuals who can occupy the room simultaneously.
- Location: Gives the position of the room in a building.
- Phone number: It is the room’s contact number.
- Apart from this other settings include department, company, and address book policy.
- Next step in the answer to “How to Add a Room Resource in Office 365” is Booking Options page.
- Allow repeating meetings: Enabled by default and it means that the resource can be used with zero break time.
- Allow scheduling only during work hours: It restricts resource usage during nonworking hours
- Automatically decline meetings outside of booking limits below: Enabled by default to add boundary for meeting duration.
- Booking window (days): With a default value of 180 it defines what the actual boundary will be.
- Maximum duration (hours): It decides how long each session lasts with both the default and maximum capacity at 24 hours.
- Enter an automatic reply to be sent to meeting organizers: It sends out a personalized response upon resource reservation.
- Booking delegates: Send accept/deny requests to all members of a meeting or to manually mentioned candidates.
- The final page before completion is the Review Resource section. Here admins get to look at a summary of all the settings.
Next up we discuss an alternative method that is a bit more technical but offers greater customization.
How to Add a Room Resource in Office 365 via Powershell Commands?
Step-1. Link to Exchange Online:
Connect-ExchangeOnline
Step 2. Then, set up Room Resources:
New-Mailbox -Name "ConferenceHall-1" -Room
Explanation: Name is user-defined and unique, -Room indicates a digital space.
Step-3. Change Room Resource properties using:
Set-Place -Identity "ConferenceHall-1" -Building "NewBuilding" -City "NewCity" -State "NewState" -CountryOrRegion "UserCountry" -Capacity 50 -Floor 2 -FloorLabel "2nd Floor"
Explanation: Here we specify the entire address of our room. Even the ones that cant be set up on Exchange Admin Center GUI like building or floor.
Step-4. Swap the Room Mailbox Settings:
Set-Mailbox -Identity "ConferenceHall-1" -DisplayName "FirstConferenceHall" -ResourceCapacity 5 -Office “Old Building 1st Floor”
Explanation: While answering how to Create a Room Resource in Office 365 we change the capacity to 5, Display Name to “FirstConferenceHall”, and Location to “Old Building 1st Floor”.
Step-5. Set the Booking Options:
Room Resource by default automatically triggers the accept/decline booking requests and enables the “allow repeat meetings” feature.
Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "ConferenceHall-1" -AutomateProcessing None -AllRequestInPolicy $true -AllBookInPolicy $false -ResourceDelegates "User1"
Explanation: In the above code snippet we turn off Auto Accept for Room Resource “Conference Hall-1”, and instead send booking requests to a specific user in this case it is “User1”.
Use this to undo the manual settings:
Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "ConferenceHall-1" -AutomateProcessing:AutoAccept
Step-6. Delegate Full Access Permission to a Room Resource Mailbox:
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity "ConferenceHall-1" -User "User1" -AccessRights full access
Explanation: In this example, we give User1 full access to the Room Resource mailbox “ConferenceHall-1”.
Step-7. Get a preview of Calendar Processing Settings on any Room Resource:
Get-CalendarProcessing -Identity "ConferenceHall-1" | Format-List *
Explanation: The above command displays the entire calendar processing for ConferenceHall-1.
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Read More: The Best Method to Migrate Computers from One Domain to Another With PowerShell Commands
Conclusion
This article explained the answer to the query “How to Create a Room Resource in Office 365” in great detail. Users are now well versed with not one but two different methods of setting up a Room resource. In the end, we also informed you about a quick way to back up Office 365 data using a professional utility.