Prepare Microsoft 365 calendar to work with UnSpot

Before connecting UnSpot to your Microsoft 365 account you need to make sure that your meeting room calendars are set up and managed in your Microsoft Office 365 Organization.

Setting up Office 365

The recommended procedure is to set up each of your meeting rooms as a Create Microsoft 365 room and equipment mailboxes equipment Mailbox. Room and Equipment Mailboxes will appear as a resource when you are creating a meeting, and support advanced features such as automatically declining meeting invitations when there are clashes and double bookings.

If you do not wish to use Room and Equipment Mailboxes, it is also possible to set up each meeting room as a Shared calendar. Shared Calendars do not show up as resources when creating a meeting, and do not automatically decline bookings if there is a conflict, so using Room and Equipment Mailboxes is highly recommended.

Office 365 Meeting Names Fix

By default, Office 365 might labels events in resource calendars with the meeting's organizer rather than its title. If you would like to see your meetings displayed in UnSpot with their title, you will need to connect to your Office 365 instance via PowerShell, and then change the default settings for your hosted Exchange server. You can find instructions in our helpful guide.

Once you have set up your meeting room calendars, you will need to choose an Microsoft 365 user account to use with UnSpot (this can be either a new account or an existing one). Your chosen account will need access to all the meeting room calendars that you want to use with UnSpot. To do this, you need to assume the identity of your meeting room mailbox (by making it a delegate of the resource in the Exchange admin center) and then set up sharing permissions.

Checklist of required steps to grant calendar management permissions to the service account:

1. Grant permissions to the calendar in the Exchange admin center
2. Add the calendar to the service account in Web Outlook (requires calendar sharing to be set up if you want UnSpot to be able to see multiple meeting rooms at once)

1. Grant permissions to a calendar in the Exchange admin center

Use the Exchange admin center (EAC) or outlook.office365.com/ecp/ to Manage resource mailboxes in Microsoft 365

1.1. Select your meeting room from the resource list in the Exchange admin center.
1.2. Select the Delegation tab and then click the Edit button in the Read and manage (Full Access) section. Enter the name of the account you wish to use with UnSpot.
1.3. Set the permissions to Full Access and click Save.

To grant access to the calendar:

1.1. Navigate to the Calendar. Click on the “Share access“, and then select the calendar you want to share.
1.2. Enter the email of the user to whom you want to grant shared access to the calendar.”
1.3. Choose the level of access for this user to the calendar:
• “If you select the option “Can view all details”, the user will be able to view all details of your events.
• If you select the option “Can make changes”, the user will be able to edit your calendar.
1.4. Click on the “Share access“.

If you grant access to calendar to other users, they will be able to add it to their Outlook calendar view. They can view or modify it depending on the permissions granted.

2. Add the calendar to the service account in Web Outlook

Requires calendar sharing to be set up if you want UnSpot to be able to see multiple meeting rooms at once.

Under the service account, log in to Web Outlook.

If an error message ‘This calendar cannot be shared’ is displayed.

If you receive a message stating that access to this calendar is not possible, there could be three reasons:
– Invalid email address.
– The email address belongs to a Microsoft 365 group.
– The email belongs to an external user who is not part of your organization.

or share the calendar in the web version of Outlook

Open the meeting room mailbox:

1. Open Outlook on the web, logged in as the account you want to use with UnSpot.
2. Click your user avatar in the top right corner of the window and select Open another mailbox.
3. Enter the email address of your resource calendar and click Open. The resource mailbox should open in a new browser window or tab.

Set sharing permissions:

1. Make sure you are in the calendar view (not the email inbox) and click “Share” on the right-hand side of the toolbar.
2. Enter the email address of the account you wish to use with UnSpot, and select “Can edit” as the permission. Click Share.

Accept the share request:

1. Switch back to your browser tab for the account you wish to use with UnSpot.
2. You should see a new email from the resource titled “I’d like to share my calendar with you”. Open the message and click Accept then click View Calendar.
3. The meeting room should now appear in UnSpot.

The user to whom you have granted access to the calendar will receive a corresponding notification via email. When they click the Accept button in the invitation, your calendar will be added to their list of calendars.

Attention: Calendar items marked as private are protected. Most users who are granted access to the calendar will only be able to see the time of private items but not the subject, location, and other details. An exception applies if you check the Allow delegate to see private events box.”

Once you have completed the sharing steps above, you can connect your Office 365 account to UnSpot. 

Note:

After grant permissions and delegating the resource calendar, you may need to wait up to 24 hours for the permissions to transfer within Azure, and only then you can connect the calendar in Unspot.