Sharing the Calendars
Last updated
Last updated
Once the service user account, in this case the user ‘Mira Connect’, has become a delegate of all the rooms where a Mira Connect device will be installed, the next step is to share the calendar of the room resources with the service account user ‘Mira Connect’.
Since the service user account will need to be able to send and receive emails for this next step, we’ll first confirm the service user account is ready to be used.
Assuming you are logged in as the administrator, under the ‘Users > Active users’ section on the Office 365 admin portal, click on the service user account, then click ‘Mail Settings’ to expand the section. If there is a spinner in any of the fields, the settings haven't propagated yet and are not ready to be customized. If you see values for ‘Mailbox permissions’, ‘Email forwarding, ‘Automatic replies’, etc. the settings have propagated and the system is ready for next steps as shown in the following figure. This could take as much as an hour or so.
Next, we’ll log out of the administrator account and sign in with our service user account.
Navigate to the Office 365 web portal, https://office.com, and sign in with the service user account name and password. In this case, we’ll sign in with the username: miraconnect@aveosystemstest.onmicrosoft.com.
From the Office 365 portal, click the Mail application to open Outlook as shown in the following figure.
Click the profile icon associated with the service user account in the upper right and select ‘Open another mailbox...’ as highlighted below.
Enter the email address of one of the rooms (search suggestions will appear as shown in the following figures and click ‘Open’.
Select the desired room and click ‘Open’.
The room mailbox will be opened in a new Outlook window. Click the calendar icon in the bottom left to display the calendar for the room resource as shown below.
Open_another_mailbox_step4.png
From the calendar view, click the ‘Share’ button in the top middle of the screen as shown next.
Start typing the name of the email address of the service user account, ’Mira Connect’ in this example, and select the account name as shown below.
Select ‘Can edit’ from the permissions list to the right of the email address. While the service user account needs at least ‘Read all details’ permissions, for future compatibility, we recommend using the ‘Can edit’ setting.
Click ‘Share’ and you should see a screen similar to the figure below.
Open_another_mailbox_step6.psd
If you see the message "The sharing invitation could not be sent", the Exchange settings from the earlier steps of delegating the room resources’ mailbox to the service user account have not finished propagating. If this happens, close the calendar sharing dialog, click ‘Share’ again, and delete the entry for the service account. If you try again in about 15 minutes, it should successfully send the calendar sharing invitation.
Next, go back to the service user account by selecting Open Another Mailbox and enter the service user account name, in this case, ‘Mira Connect’ as shown below.
Click ‘Open’ to open the service user account. The service user account will have received an email indicating that the room resource has shared its calendar as shown below.
Click on the email to open it, and click the ‘Accept and view calendar’ button in the email as shown below.
You should see the room calendar appear under the ‘People's calendars’ heading in the sidebar and on the top of the calendar for the service account's calendar in Outlook as shown in the following figure.
Repeat this step for each room's mailbox.
At the end of this process, the service user account, ‘Mira Connect’ in this example, will have ‘Can edit’ access to each of the room’s calendars.
The service user account, by default, will have several calendars that you might want to remove, including ‘Birthdays’ and, for U.S. destinations, ‘United States holidays’ as shown in the following figure. Removing these calendars will ensure that they can’t be assigned, in error, to rooms within Mira Portal.
To remove the United States holidays calendar, right click on the ‘United State holidays’ label and select ‘Remove’ as shown in the following figure.
To remove the Birthday calendar, right click on the ‘Your calendars’ label and select ‘Turn off the birthday calendar’ as shown in below.
When reserving a room through a calendar invitation, Office 365’s default behavior is to remove the meeting subject and replace it with the name of the person who scheduled the room. This default behavior means that calendars invitations that are received by Mira Connect will not show the meeting subject information, however we can change those setting to ensure the meeting title remains in the calendar invitation that Mira Connect receives.
Changing this behavior of the room resources requires using Microsoft’s PowerShell command console as described next. Don’t worry, it sounds complicated, but it’s not too hard.
First, download the PowerShell program from the link below and then click the Download link highlighted in the following figure and install the program.
Once you’ve installed the PowerShell program, you can right-click on the icon and run it as it as an administrator as shown in below.
From the PowerShell program, we’ll execute a series of commands as described below.
To start, import the authentication module with the command:
Next, get the credentials of the Office 365 administrator. Note, use the administrators account here, not the service user account, nor any of the room resource accounts.
The Get-Credential command will prompt you with a Microsoft Office 365 login prompt for your login name and password. Enter your Office 365 administrator credentials here.
Next, we’ll create a remote session by entering the following command on one line:
Next, we’ll import this session with the command:
And then run the Import-PSSession command again:
Finally, we connect to the session with the command:
DeleteSubject set to $false
The DeleteSubject parameter specifies whether to remove the subject of incoming meeting requests. The default value is $true. By setting this parameter to $false, the calendar invitation that appears on Mira Connect will include the Subject of the meeting. This provides more information to the room participant of whether they are joining the right meeting. Set this value to $false.
AddOrganizerToSubject set to $false
The AddOrganizerToSubject parameter specifies whether the meeting organizer's name is used as the subject of the meeting request instead of the subject. The value of this parameter is set to $true by default and since we’re already disabling the DeleteSubject parameter to keep the subject name, we should disable AddOrganizerToSubject so we don’t add the organizer’s name to the subject. Set this value to $false.
DeleteComments set to $false
The DeleteComments parameter specifies whether to remove or keep any text in the message body of incoming meeting requests. The default value of this parameter is $true. By setting DeleteComments to $false, the information in the body of the meeting invite can be used by Mira Connect to find dial-in numbers as well as to show the invitation to the room user in case there is other meeting information the user would need to see. If you don’t want to have the text of the meeting invitation body visible to users in the room, leave this value as $true, and Mira Connect will only be able to use information from the ‘location’ field to find meeting dial-in numbers. Set this parameter to $false.
To set these parameters, use the command below for each room resource. In our case, we’ll set the values for our example room, ‘BoardRoom’:
Substitute the names of your other rooms for ‘BoardRoom’ in your organization and run this command for each of your rooms. Alternatively, if you have more than a few rooms, you can copy and paste this script to set the parameters for all your rooms at one time:
Once all the room resources have been configured, we are ready to associate the room resource calendars with rooms in Mira Portal.
To finish our configuration of our room resources, we’ll use the Set‑CalendarProcessing command to set options for the calendars for each of the room resources. The options that we recommend setting are described below. For reference, the full list of the command parameters to Set-CalendarProcessing may be found here: .
