Solved – Office 365 Room Calendar Not Auto Processing or Accepting Meeting Requests

After having created a Resource Room in the Office365 Admin console (with an Enterprise E1 license,) you may find that meetings which are created in Outlook and which are sent, are not automatically processing and sending verification confirmations back to the person that created the event. Nor will new events populate the event in the new room’s Outlook calendar. In this case, there are a few things we can check to ensure the room behaves as intended.

  1. First, after creating the room, ensure that you, as an admin, are set as an owner of the room. Under O365 > Admin Center > Rooms and Resources > place a checkmark next to the room in question. Ensure that Allow repeating meetings and Automatic Processing is On. Then, click on Edit Exchange Settings:

2. In this example, we don’t use booking delegates. In the Exchange Settings for the new resource room, make sure Booking requests are accepted automatically. 

3. Edit the booking options, contact information, email address, and mailtip settings to your preferences and then click on Mailbox Delegation. Here, add yourself under Full Access so that we can go on to our next step.

4. Next, log into your own OWA admin Outlook online inbox. In Outlook, click your profile photo in the upper right corner and click “Open another mailbox.” Type the address of the room and open the webmail for the room.

5. Here you may see some emails of previous attempts to book events like the following with the error “Your calendar couldn’t be checked to see whether this event conflicts with other events.“:

6. This error lets us know that automatic processing is not working even though we have it set to “On” in our first step. Had the processing worked correctly, we wouldn’t even see this event email in the mailbox of the room in question. 

7. In the upper right corner, click the Gear icon, then under Your app settings, click Calendar.

8. In the calendar resource scheduling settings, ensure that under the scheduling options, “Automatically process event invitations and cancellations” is checked, and then click Save. 

9. In theory, these settings should be enough to get the calendar to auto process and verify, however, your results may vary. Test by creating a meeting event in outlook with the new room. When you send the meeting, you should receive a verification email in your inbox in less than a minute. If you don’t receive the verification, check the inbox of the calendar again. You’ll probably find more emails with the “Your calendar couldn’t be checked…” errors.

10. Time to open PowerShell and connect to your O365 Exchange. If you’ve enabled MFA (two-factor authentication) use the guide on how to connect to Exchange with Hybrid/Modern Authentication here. If you don’t use Modern 2FA authentication, use the following commands:

$LiveCred = Get-Credential

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

Import-PSSession $Session

11. Run the following command to get the calendar processing conditions:

Get-CalendarProcessing -Identity "[email protected]" | Format-List

12. It’s helpful to first get a list of all calendar processing objects of a room that already works correctly to refer to when editing your new room’s permissions. If you don’t already have a room that you can reference, below is a list of my room that is not behaving normally:

13. Notice that ProcessExternalMeetingMessages is set to False. Let’s change this to True with the following command:

Set-CalendarProcessing [email protected] -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True

14. After making this and a few other changes displayed in the following screenshot, go ahead and try creating another test meeting and see if the autoprocessing behaves as it should. If you’re still having trouble, try referring to the screenshot below as an example, and use the “Set-CalendarProcessing” command to edit the values.

15. Once you successfully receive verifications and the calendar populates with events as it should, you may want to set the calendar to display the owner of the event and details of the event (rather than the event is listed in the calendar as only “Busy”.) To do so, follow the instructions I wrote in my article here

Office365 Outlook Room Calendar not showing details – displays busy only – fix when Set-MailboxFolderPermission does not resolve

Solved: Office365 O365 Resources Rooms and & Equipment cannot view details or subject in shared calendar, can only see “Busy” and Set-MailboxFolderPermission did not fix or resolve.

So a room calendar would not display who reserved the room, and users requested that the calendars for room reservations display who reserved the room and the details. By default the event only displays “Busy”. Most posts I found online for this issue have the same resolution: use Set-MailboxFolderPermission to display details, comments, subject, and organizer. I did this and tried this using the identity in quotes as well as the full email address of the room, however the Set-MailboxFolderPermission setting did not work and the calendar would still only show “Busy”.

I was able to resolve the problem by looking at the rights of the users.

I found that the Calendar Access Rights for the User: “Default” only had {AvailabilityOnly}

To check permissions and fix this issue, first open PowerShell and connect to your O365 Exchange. If you’ve enabled MFA on your Office365 account (two-factor authentication,) use the guide on how to connect to Exchange with Hybrid/Modern Authentication here. If you don’t use Modern 2FA authentication, use the following commands: 

$LiveCred = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange-ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

Once connected, first check that the default user has the correct AccessRights and permissions to work with the calendar. As you can see below here, the Default user has {AvailabilityOnly} permissions when issuing the following command:

Get-MailboxFolderPermission [email protected]:\Calendar
PS C:\admin> Get-MailboxFolderPermission [email protected]:\Calendar

FolderName           User                 AccessRights
----------           ----                 ------------
Calendar             Default              {AvailabilityOnly}
Calendar             Anonymous            {None}

I changed the AccessRights from {AvailabilityOnly} to {PublishingAuthor} with the following command:

Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity "[email protected]:\Calendar" -User default -AccessRights PublishingAuthor

And then ensured the identity has the correct CalendarProcessing switches with this command:

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "[email protected]" -AddOrganizerToSubject $true -DeleteComments $false -DeleteSubject $false

Now the event’s details and subject can be viewed by everyone. This change takes place pretty quickly, within a minute – the “Busy” events should change to display the details when you close/open Outlook and/or switch between the calendars in Outlook online. Hope this saves someone else a call to MS Support.

In the event the new room’s Calendar is not auto processing or accepting meeting requests, check out my article here:

Solved – Office 365 Room Calendar Not Auto Processing or Accepting Meeting Requests

Please leave a comment, thanks.