One of the hardest things to explain when teaching a course in Teams Room Systems is why a calendar invite a person receives can’t be forwarded to a room so that a “Join Now” button appears in the room console in the room.
There are a couple of misunderstandings here.
First of all, the problem is not in Teams, it is in Exchange! It’s just alot more visible in the Teams Room since that’s where the users look. If they would have a look in the room calendar in Outlook, they would probably see that the meeting is missing there too!
Second, there are some different things messing things up here that makes this even more complicated for the end user to understand. Some of these are:
- When a room accept an invite, the confirmation is sent to the person originally creating the meeting
- Default setting is that noone outside of the organization (tenant) is allowed to invite a room
- If someone inside the organization forwards an invitation from someone outside of the organization to a room, it still counts as originating outside of the organization
So, often the confusion starts here. Who is seen by the Exchange server as the one who tries to book the room.
So, how can we permit a room to receive an invite even though the originating organization isn’t the same as where the room reside?
There is a PowerShell command to permit users outside of the organization to invite our rooms and have the rooms accept the invitation. To connect to the Exchange Online service in Microsoft 365, you can follow my guide at Connecting to Exchange Online using PowerShell and then run the command necessary.
The command is:
Get-Mailbox <room e-mail-address> | Set-CalendarProcessing -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $true
Note though that this command will open up the ability for anyone in the world who knows the address of the room to invite it to a meeting. This can be adjusted so that only certain external domains may invite the room or even just specific users (e-mail addresses) outside of the own organization (tenant) may get an accept on a calendar invite.