Issue with Room Declining All Recurring Meetings in Microsoft 365 Due to Single Conflict

Question

Issue with Room Declining All Recurring Meetings in Microsoft 365 Due to Single Conflict

Anonymous

Hi!

I am the administrator for our Microsoft 365 domain. When we schedule a recurring meeting and add a room, the room declines all occurrences if it is occupied at any one of the times. The correct behavior should be that the room accepts all occurrences when it is available and only declines the times when it is occupied, so that the organizer only needs to manually open those specific instances and change the room. The email from the room specifies which meeting times have conflicts, but it still declines everything.

I have tested this issue both on the web version of Outlook and on the desktop version for Mac.

Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Is it a bug or is there a way to fix it?

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2 answers

Answer 1

Hello Martin_Hbck,

Thanks for reaching out to the Microsoft Community.

Sincere apologies for any inconvenience this issue might be causing you. This behavior where a room in Microsoft 365 declines an entire series of recurring meetings due to a conflict in just one instance is often related to the room's configuration settings, particularly the "AutomateProcessing" and "ConflictPercentageAllowed" properties.

In your case, you’ve mentioned encountering the issue on both Outlook for Mac and Outlook on the web.

While we are checking for any known issues or outages with Outlook, could you please provide more details? This will help us work together more effectively to address the problem.

Please share screen shots of the declined emails (for both outlook for Mac and Web)
Please share the output of the following PowerShell command in a text file.

Get-CalendarProcessing -Identity "<RoomMailbox>" | Format-List AutomateProcessing, AllowConflicts, ConflictPercentageAllowed, MaximumConflictInstances

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Answer 2

I have the same issue and looking around the web and this forum so do plenty of others. The fix is to set BOTH the MaximumConflictInstancesAllowed and ConflictPercentageAllowed parameters on the meeting room. If you log into Outlook using the resource account then I believe you can set both through the UI, but you can also do it with ExchangePowershell:

Install-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement

Import-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement

Connect-ExchangeOnline

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity ******@contoso.com -ConflictPercentageAllowed 50 -MaximumConflictInstancesAllowed 100

In the above I'm allowing ******@contoso.com to accept recurring meetings as long as no more than 100 instances AND no more than 50% of the instances have conflicts. The higher you make each of those values the more forgiving the room resource is. There's a really good presentation of this here.

Note that if you don't want the meeting room to create conflicting bookings then make sure -AllowConflicts is set to $false (which I found very counter intuitive at first, but the blog post I reference above has a really good flow chart that explains the interaction of these three parameters nicely.

Hope this helps!