Double-Booked resources are a big problem with Office 365 installations.
While Outlook and Exchange warn you of conflicts at booking time, it is easy for this information to get lost, outdated, or simply never acted upon.
Being focused on server-side Exchange solutions, we created an option.
For the DIY among you
We did offer a free PowerShell script to report on double bookings – and it was downloaded thousands of times. Look to our blog for additional information. It required Basic Authentication so will soon be obsolete. We have no plans to update it for Modern Authentication, instead focusing on our Double-Booking cmdlet.
For Office 365
We have a cmdlet (you will need to contact us for a key) that does a lot:
- Updated for Modern Authentication in October, 2022.
- Reports double booked meetings.
- Sends email notification to each meeting organizer about those upcoming conflicts and ask them to resolve the conflict.
- Removes conflicts by cancelling conflicting meeting occurrences that Exchange allowed (even though there was already an existing meeting booked for that room/date/time.)
- Preferentially keep conflicting bookings for company VIPs, and,
- Designed to receive piped input from Exchange PowerShell cmdlets.
For instance for the following conflict in Room 222:
Both meeting organizers can automatically be notified by the cmdlet:
You can think of the basic functions it offers as:
- You guys work it out. aka Alert both (all) parties
- The early bird gets the room. aka First one to have booked wins
- Rank has its privileges. aka VIPs win. (Unless there’s two of them then see 1.)
We’re no longer releasing this cmdlet to individual users. If someone wants to license the tech for wider distribution, then feel free to contact us for information.