Recurring meetings with conflicts - best practices on how to book them

Question

_{Friday, December 14, 2018 2:06 PM}

Hi,

We have a set up in our office where people can book a meeting in a room by inviting that room as a participant. If the room is available, the user will receive an email saying the meeting was accepted. If it is not available, the user will receive an email saying the booking was declined.

With recurring meetings, the meeting series will be declined as a whole if on one of the dates, the room is not available. The user will receive an email with an overview of the dates on which there were conflicts. 

Currently we advise users to then cancel the initial recurring meeting, and book separate (series of) meetings, based on the conflicts. However this can be a tedious exercise if there were for example 5 conflicts in a series of 15 meetings. You then need to book 6 or potentially many more separate (series of) meetings. 

Is there a better way to go about this? We do not want our meeting rooms to accept double meetings.

Is it possible for example to detach a meeting from the series it was a part of? Or are there any suggested configuration changes that could be helpful here?

Thanks in advance.

All replies (4)

_{Monday, December 17, 2018 2:44 AM}

Hi ED win D,

>>Is it possible for example to detach a meeting from the series it was a part of? Or are there any suggested configuration changes that could be helpful here?

According to my research, currently, for this situation, we can only set separate recurring meetings for room mailbox if there is a conflict. We cannot detach a meeting from the series as a whole recurring meeting is one object.

As a workaround, we can use the Schedule Assistance to choose a better time which is available for all recipients. To check free/busy information, please click Schedule Assistance option in New Meeting window.

Hope this is helpful to you.

Regards,

Perry

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they helped. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected].

Click here to learn more. Visit the dedicated forum to share, explore and talk to experts about Microsoft Teams.

_{Wednesday, December 19, 2018 6:04 AM}

Hi ED win D,

I'm writing to see if the reply above is helpful to you. 

If the reply answered your question, please mark it as answer which will benefit other forum members a lot.

Thank you for your understanding and support.

Regards,

Perry

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they helped. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected].

Click here to learn more. Visit the dedicated forum to share, explore and talk to experts about Microsoft Teams.

_{Monday, February 11, 2019 10:14 AM}

Dear Perry,

Many thanks for your reply and apologies for not getting back sooner.

I understand that Outlook by default will always handle meeting series as a whole and therefore will either accept or reject the entire meeting. 

Can be Outlook be configured in such a way that in case of conflicts, Outlook would automatically break down the meeting into separate series (or separate meetings)? 

For example: if I book a recurring meeting for every week on Monday with 10 occurrences, and only the 5th would be rejected, that Outlook would then automatically create two separate series (1-4, 6-10) and accept those, and only reject the 5th occurrence.

We are currently recommending the use of the scheduling assistant already. However this also has its limitations. For example, when you are booking a recurring meeting series for a period of several months. With the scheduling assistant you can only view a few days at the same time by zooming out (if you zoom out more it's not usable anymore), so it's still a tedious exercise to check the availability for every meeting occurrence. 

Any other recommendations on this part?

One other thing I am thinking of is that users could also check the calendar of the room they want to book, because then they can get an easy overview per month for example. 

Best,

Edwin

_{Friday, July 12, 2019 8:18 AM}

Hi Ed win D, 

I know this a late reply, sorry, if your using exchange, and have set the room to a roommailbox you will be able to configure the Conflict settings for this type of issue using the exchange powershell and using the cmdlet - set-calendarprocessing. 

useful link would be - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Exchange-Team-Blog/Automatic-Processing-of-Recurring-Meeting-Requests-with/ba-p/587507