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      How to integrate your Outlook Calendar with Office 365 and SpacetoCo - Advanced Settings

      Advanced configuration settings for a seamless Outlook rooms integration with SpacetoCo

      IMPORTANT:

      ✋These are advanced configuration suggestions for an already setup outlook sync. Only attempt these steps if you know what you're doing and are authorised to do so by your organisation.

      You can find the guide to initially setup Outlook/Office365 with SpacetoCo here:
      https://support.spacetoco.com/how-to-integrate-your-outlook-calendar-with-office-365-and-spacetoco-enterprise

      What you need before we begin

      Prelude - CalendarProcessing

      This guide uses the Set-CalendatProcessing command to set advanced configuration options for how a room calendar processes an incoming event. You can find out more about this command and it's options here:
      https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-calendarprocessing?view=exchange-ps&redirectedfrom=MSDN

      As you go through these steps, you can use the following command to check the current configuration for the room:

      Get-CalendarProcessing -Identity "perfecttownhall@cityoffastbookings.gov.au" | Format-List

      Replacing perfecttownhall@cityoffastbookings.gov.au with the room calendar email.

      Keep Event Titles in the Room Calendar

      By default, the exchange server will strip an event of all identifiable information from an event when adding it to the room calendar, instead displaying the event under the user's name, e.g. SpacetoCo will sync an event as "Regular STC Booking: Stitch n' Bitch Meetup", this is the title in the personal calendar, but will display in the room calendar as "SpacetoCo Sync User".

      This feature is useful to prevent sensitive meeting titles from leaking, e.g. "HR meeting about Bob" or "Victims Support Session". It is important to assess if disabling this is appropriate on a per-room basis.

      We can disable this functionality so that all events added to the room calendar carry over the original event name using the following command:

      Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "perfecttownhall@cityoffastbookings.gov.au" -AddOrganizerToSubject $false -DeleteSubject $false

      Replacing perfecttownhall@cityoffastbookings.gov.au with the room calendar email.

      Once again, this is an all-or-nothing setting and will publicly display all event names added to the room.

      Bypass SpacetoCo from Requesting Approval

      Some organisations have their rooms configured so that all events added to the room calendar need prior approval from the room delegates (bookings officers), this can be useful to prevent over use of the resource by internal users/groups, but can be annoying if all SpacetoCo bookings need to be re-approved into the calendar after already receiving approval in the SpacetoCo dashboard.

      It is possible to specify users/groups who can bypass approval into the room calendar.

      Step 1 - Create a Group (optional)

      I'm assuming if you have gotten this far that you're a jaded IT admin, so let's be real for a sec; once people find out they can be added to the exempt list from approvals, all kinds of characters will slither out of the woodwork requesting to be added for XYZ reason, and maintaining a list of people via PowerShell is gonna really suck.

      To prevent having to run this command all the time, you can just create a user group in exchange and add that as exempt, so you can add and remove people from the comfort of the GUI. Let's call this group "Room Bypass Users" with the group email "roombypassusers@cityoffastbookings.gov.au", and that we've added the Outlook sync user "spacetoco@cityoffastbookings.gov.au" to the group.

      Step 2 - Add the User/Group Exemption

      You can configure the list with the following command:

      Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "perfecttownhall@cityoffastbookings.gov.au" -BookInPolicy "roombypassusers@cityoffastbookings.gov.au"

      Replacing perfecttownhall@cityoffastbookings.gov.au with the room calendar email and roombypassusers@cityoffastbookings.gov.au with the user/group.

      If you're a masochist, you can specify a list of users/groups with the following format: "Value1","Value2",..."ValueN"

      Combining what we've learnt

      If you want to implement both of these settings on a room, you can combine them like the following:

      Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "perfecttownhall@cityoffastbookings.gov.au" -AddOrganizerToSubject $false -DeleteSubject $false -BookInPolicy "roombypassusers@cityoffastbookings.gov.au"

       Saving you a good 5 minutes. 👍