Office 365 meeting names fix

If you are an Office 365 customer, and you are seeing the meeting organizer’s name instead of the meeting title in UnSpot, this is because Office 365 meeting rooms rename your meetings by default. Follow these instructions to change your default Office 365 settings, and allow UnSpot to show your meeting titles.

Part 1 – Connect to Office 365 via PowerShell

There are two ways to connect to Office 365 via PowerShell:

Option 1: Azure Cloud Shell

If you have an active Azure subscription, you can connect to Azure Cloud Shell by visiting https://shell.azure.com/. If asked to choose between Bash or PowerShell, choose PowerShell. Once you are connected, you can skip to part 2 of these instructions (changing your calendar defaults).

Option 2: Local PowerShell

If you do not have an Azure subscription, it is still possible to connect to your Office 365 tenant by using PowerShell on a local Windows machine. You will need to perform the following steps to make sure that the required modules are installed and set up.

Note: You may follow our guide or Microsoft’s instructions if you prefer.

1. The first step is to install the Exchange Online Management PowerShell module. You can do this by running the following command:

Install-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement

By default, the PowerShell Gallery (PSGallery) isn’t configured as a trusted repository for Install-Module. If you see a message asking you if you would like to install modules from PSGallery, select Yes.

2. Once the management module is installed, you need to connect to your Office 365 tenant. To do this, run:

Connect-ExchangeOnline

You should see a sign-in window pop up. Sign in as an administrator in your tenant. If the script finishes, and you don’t see any errors then the connection has succeeded.

Part 2 – Change your calendar defaults

Note: You may follow our guide or Microsoft’s instructions if you prefer.

In this part we are going to change four settings on your meeting room mailbox. These four settings are:

• DeleteSubject – Removes the title from meetings if True
• AddOrganizerToSubject – Adds the email address of the meeting’s organizer to the meeting’s title if True
• DeleteComments – Removes the meeting’s description if True (note that the meeting’s description is required by UnSpot’s check-in function)
• RemovePrivateProperty – Ignores the meeting’s privacy/visibility if True. UnSpot will hide the title of private meetings if this setting is set to False.

The instructions below assume that you want to turn off all four of these settings, but if you would like to keep some of them you can modify the command in step 3 to remove the settings you do not want to change.

1. The first step is to decide which mailboxes you would like to change. The following PowerShell command lists the name and ID of all room and equipment mailboxes in your organization:

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox,EquipmentMailbox | FL -Property DisplayName, UserPrincipalName

2. For each mailbox that you would like to change, check its existing settings by running the following command (making sure to fill in the ID of your own meeting room):

Get-CalendarProcessing -Identity THE ID OF THE ROOM YOU WOULD LIKE TO CHECK | FL -Property Identity,DeleteSubject,AddOrganizerToSubject,DeleteComments,RemovePrivateProperty

You should see output that looks like the following:

Identity              : Conference Room 1
DeleteSubject         : True
AddOrganizerToSubject : True
DeleteComments        : True
RemovePrivateProperty : True

If your output shows all settings as False instead of True then your room is already configured correctly – you can skip the next step.

3. The final step is to change the defaults for your room. To do this, run the following command:

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity THE ID OF THE ROOM YOU WOULD LIKE TO CHANGE -DeleteSubject $False -AddOrganizerToSubject $False -DeleteComments $False -RemovePrivateProperty $False

That’s it! Check that the command has worked by running the Get-CalendarProcessing command from step 2 again – the values should now all show False. Your meeting room should now show the correct tile for all new meetings (existing meetings will still show the organizer name).

You will need to repeat steps 2 and 3 above for each meeting room that you would like to change. If you would like to make this change for all your room and equipment mailboxes, you can run the following command instead, which automatically changes the defaults for each room or equipment mailbox in your organization:

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox,EquipmentMailbox | ForEach {
  echo "Setting defaults for $_"
  Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity $_.UserPrincipalName -DeleteSubject $False -AddOrganizerToSubject $False -DeleteComments $False -RemovePrivateProperty $False
}

———

Or try Resource mailbox’s calendar shows the organizer’s name instead of the subject in an Exchange Server environment