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.

How to Create a Room Resource in Office 365 Using Admin Center?

1. Sign in to the EAC.
2. On the left-hand pane expand Recipients and click on Resources
3. The resources window opens up press the + icon with the text Add a resource.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. The next step in the answer to “How to Add a Room Resource in Office 365” is the 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.
7. 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: The 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 can’t 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, the Display Name to “FirstConferenceHall”, and the 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.

Without a doubt resource creation is an integral part of the Office 365 experience. However, even ‌cloud-based data can get corrupted or become unavailable. Don’t worry and check out the next section to see what experts recommend.

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.