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Accepted
Kjensen
Asked: 2016-06-21 04:21:52 +0800 CST

Outlook/Exchange Meeting room reporting issues

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Reporting

Sometimes stuff in meeting rooms break. This needs to be easy for people to report, like "the projector is not working", "speaker phone not working", "room very dirty" or whatever we can think of.

This information needs to be stored somewhere, in a database or something, so it can be cleared once it is fixed - and somebody should be notified about it (facility management DL, email or whatever).

Notification for other bookers

If I have booked a meeting room, that is now marked with an issue, I should get a notification. Preferably while booking, it would be visible in the interface, but if not, then maybe I would get an email stating the issue, so I can consider rebooking.

The question

Does software like this exist, maybe even some functionality in Exchange/Outlook, that I am not aware of? Third-party?

exchange outlook microsoft-office-365

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This is likely to be closed as it is more of a "software recommendation" question as it is currently written. You may be able to wordsmith your question better to avoid that, not sure.

    That said, there is no built in functionality within Exchange to do this, but you could look at programmatically doing what you want.

    A possible solution (logically) would look like this:

    1. User submits a ticket to your Helpdesk ticketing system
    2. Ticketing system or some other automation tool (or even a script that a Helpdesk admin kicks off), updates the Room mailbox auto response with the issue the room is having. This will only help with new booking requests though. For existing booking requests, it would be difficult, but you could potentially have it pull all meetings booked within the next 7 days and have it auto-email the organizer with the issue. Again, this would require scripting on the IT end along with a way to kick it off...likely manually from the Helpdesk because if someone sends an email to the ticketing system like "Conf Room 1 is out of coffee" when they shouldn't have sent it to IT, you don't want some automated process sending that out to all the bookings.
    3. Once the issue is resolved, a script to change the room's auto response back to normal for new bookings.

    These types of things can be accomplished but it would require Exchange scripting that is beyond the scope of a quick answer here...

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  2. I'm not aware of any. You could probably get something together if you bring in Microsoft Flow or PowerApp. You could create a SharePoint list for tracking submissions, and wire up flow to take action when new items are added to the calendar, that checks against that SP list.

    Flow is still evolving, and I know it has a check for new items being added to a calendar, but have not dug in deep enough to provide a more detailed solution.

    Outside of that, you may have to custom code or script something that handles the interaction.

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