2025 January Microsoft 365 Integration Release

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General availability: January 12, 2025

Native Exchange booking
Enhancements and general maintenance

Updates

Native Exchange Booking

Seamlessly book a meeting space in Condeco when the associated Microsoft Exchange room is directly added to an Exchange calendar event. Our new 'Native Exchange booking' for the Condeco Microsoft 365 integration, allows users to book Condeco meeting spaces directly in Exchange calendar events from Outlook on the desktop or web, the Outlook mobile app, or from the Microsoft Teams calendar, without launching additional tools or add-ins.

Key benefits

Simplifies the booking process and improves user experience, by allowing users to invite an Exchange room directly from their calendar using Microsoft Outlook or Teams.
Adds convenience to existing and familiar booking journeys when creating Microsoft calendar events.
Combines the simplicity of Microsoft Exchange with the power of Condeco, allowing users to easily include meeting spaces in Exchange calendar events and further enhance bookings with visitor details, catering services, etc. from Condeco.
Adds support for third-party devices that connect to Microsoft Exchange room calendars, such as Microsoft Teams panels.

Bookings are automatically created in Condeco when an Exchange room that is mapped to a Condeco meeting space, is invited to a Microsoft calendar event. We've made this process seamless by reducing the need to launch additional tools or add-ins, and made management easier by introducing a new 'Exchange space mapping' module.

Make Condeco bookings directly from preferred Microsoft calendar tools

Users can book Condeco meeting spaces directly from their preferred Microsoft Exchange calendar apps, such as Outlook for Mobile or the Teams calendar, by simply inviting the Exchange space.

Booking meeting spaces natively from Exchange

New events: Add the Exchange room to Attendee list or Location field

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By adding a Microsoft Exchange room to an event on their Exchange calendar, users can now seamlessly generate bookings in Condeco. This provides a convenient and streamlined process to book a meeting space directly from their Exchange calendar, using either Outlook or Teams from their desktop or mobile device.

A Microsoft Exchange room can be invited to a new event by adding them either to the attendee list or to the location field, and sending the invitation.

Existing events: Forward event invite to an Exchange room

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For existing events, users can forward the event to an Exchange room to book the corresponding Condeco meeting space. This also allows internal attendees to easily add a meeting space when the organizer did not book one.

Condeco must have access to the organizer’s Exchange calendar to synchronize with the invited Exchange room. Invites received from people outside your organization is not currently supported.

Booking from a third-party screen

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Screens that connect directly to Microsoft Exchange room calendars, like Microsoft Teams panels, can now also create bookings in Condeco. Since users cannot authenticate from the screen, bookings made through these devices are created using a default Condeco account.

Booking from Condeco

Depending on the access granted to the user's calendar, a booking created in Condeco for a meeting space mapped to an Exchange room, either creates an event in the user’s calendar or an event in the Exchange room calendar:

If Condeco has access to the user’s calendar and they select the option to ‘Add to Outlook calendar’, an event is created in their calendar and any Exchange room is invited.
If Condeco does not have access to the user’s calendar or if they choose not to ‘Add to Outlook calendar’, an event is created directly in the Exchange room calendar(s) for each room booked. Note: In this scenario, the organizer, hosts, and any attendees added to the booking in Condeco, are not added to the event in the Exchange room calendar.

This ensures that the Exchange room calendar and the Condeco meeting space are always synchronized, allowing users to check availability of the space from either Exchange or Condeco.

Map Exchange rooms to Condeco meeting spaces

Before you can map Exchange rooms to Condeco meeting spaces, an Exchange administrator must first grant access to the Microsoft Graph endpoint Place.Read.All. Condeco will not subscribe to any Exchange room calendars until the Place.Read.All permission has been granted.

To do this, log in as a Global Admin and navigate to Application Setup > Exchange room mapping and select the tenant. Follow the instructions to grant consent to Place.Read.All, which is shown in the permission request as Read all company places.

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When the permissions are accepted, refresh the Exchange room mapping page to display your Exchange rooms in the table. Note that it can take up to an hour for rooms to start appearing in the table.

Consent must be granted for each Exchange tenant.

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No building and floor information? If the building and floor columns are empty (as in the above image), this means your Exchange rooms are not configured with additional location meta data. The missing information is not essential and does not affect functionality, but you can add it by using the 'Set-Place' command from PowerShell. Learn more: Find out more about configuring Exchange room location data at Microsoft Learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-place?view=exchange-ps

To synchronize an Exchange room calendar with Condeco meeting spaces, the Exchange room mailbox is mapped to the corresponding Condeco meeting space. Our new 'Exchange room mapping' page simplifies this by allowing Administrators to create and manage all mapped spaces from a central point.

Existing room mailbox associations

When access to Place.Read.All is granted, Condeco automatically maps and displays all existing associations between Exchange room mailboxes and Condeco meeting spaces that are set via the 'Equipment mailbox' field in Resource Admin.

Automatic mapping can only happen if these mailboxes exist in the room list provided by the Place.Read.All endpoint. As this endpoint only lists Exchange mailboxes of type 'Room' and not 'Equipment', we recommend ensuring your mailboxes are of type 'Room' before granting permission to Place.Read.All. If any mailboxes are of type 'Equipment', convert them to 'Room' type using PowerShell first and then grant permission.

Existing Condeco bookings

A calendar event is automatically created directly in the Exchange room calendar for any existing Condeco booking not already linked to a calendar event. This ensures that the Condeco room and Exchange room calendars are in sync.

Behaviors and limitations

Access to users' Microsoft Exchange calendars

To maintain synchronization between a Condeco meeting space and a Microsoft Exchange room, the Condeco Microsoft 365 Integration must have access to the calendar of any user who is inviting the Exchange room to their event. Any invitation from a user whose calendar Condeco does not have access to is automatically declined and the user informed by email. Forwarding invites to an Exchange room where the organizer is external will also be declined automatically.

Setup and clean down times

Microsoft Exchange rooms do not support setup and clean-down periods. This means that Condeco meeting spaces mapped to an Exchange room might appear available to book in Exchange during the defined setup and clean-down periods, however, Condeco will decline bookings created for those periods.

Multi-room bookings

Up to eight meeting spaces can be booked using the Condeco Microsoft 365 Integration. If more than eight spaces are invited, all spaces decline the invite. If an additional space is added to an existing event that already has eight spaces, the additional space declines the event.

Maximum supported instances in a recurring booking

Condeco Microsoft 365 Integration supports up to 450 individual booking instances. This is calculated by multiplying the number of instances in a recurring booking by the number of meeting spaces included in the booking. If this limit is exceeded, the booking is declined.

Exchange booking rules

It is important to ensure that the booking rules set in Exchange match the booking rules configured for the resource group in Condeco. Conflicting rules result in a poor experience for the user.

Closing meeting spaces

Closing a meeting space in Condeco does not currently block the room in Exchange and prevent it from being invited to Exchange calendar events. Therefore, instead of closing a meeting space, we recommend creating a place-holder booking for the duration of the closure, to ensure the calendars are synchronized and the space is not shown as available in Exchange.

Forwarding calendar invites to an Exchange room

To synchronize successfully when forwarding a calendar event to the Exchange room, Condeco must have permission to access the calendar of the event organizer.

Invites from people outside your organization are not supported. This is because most organizations have Exchange rules in place which restrict anyone outside the organization from booking an Exchange room. Forwarded invites are only supported when the original event organizer is an internal user (and Condeco has permissions to access their calendar).

To reject all invites to Exchange room calendars from external email addresses, set the following command:

Set-CalendarProcessing -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages false

Forwarding invites from external organizers is not yet supported.

Attendees

Attendees added to an Exchange calendar event synchronized with Condeco are considered ‘virtual’ and therefore do not appear on the Condeco booking form attendee list. Attendees can be marked as 'onsite' from the Condeco Outlook add-in.

Learn more: Attendees and visitors

Smart alternatives

The Condeco Microsoft 365 Integration's 'smart alternatives' that automatically finds alternative spaces when a booked space is unavailable for all instances of a recurring meeting, or when moving a booking to a new time, uses the original search criteria provided by the user in the Condeco Outlook add-in, to find a suitable alternative.

If an Exchange room is invited directly from the Exchange calendar event rather than via the add-in, only limited search details can be determined when finding a suitable alternative, such as the location and floor of the original meeting space.

Learn more:

Specific recurrences

Microsoft Exchange does not support Condeco's ‘specific’ recurrence option that allows dates to be selected in an irregular pattern. Therefore, to ensure a seamless synchronization between Condeco and Exchange room calendars when Native Exchange resource booking is released, the ‘specific’ option will be disabled for Condeco Microsoft 365 integration customers.

Learn more: Recurrence patterns and Outlook

Linked rooms

The Condeco Microsoft 365 integration does not yet support linked rooms. Bookings with a linked room combination are not synchronized to the Exchange room calendar and may cause out-of-sync scenarios.

Re-mapping Exchange resources to Condeco rooms

Before unmapping an Exchange room from a Condeco meeting space and mapping to another, ensure there are no events in the Exchange room calendar or for the Condeco meeting space. If events exist, we recommend contacting the Condeco support team for assistance.

Permission changes

For Condeco to be able to read all Exchange rooms within a tenant, it must have access to a new permission:

Name	Type	Description
Place.Read.All	Application	Allows the app to read company places (conference rooms and room lists) for calendar events and other applications, without a signed-in user.

When a Global Admin logs in to Condeco and opens the new Exchange mapping module, they are provided with a link to grant access. The link must be activated by an Exchange admin with the necessary privileges to grant access.

Without granting this permission to Microsoft Graph, the Condeco Microsoft 365 Integration will remain functional, but it will not be possible to map any new Exchange rooms to Condeco meeting spaces.