How to Process Recurring Meetings on a Conference Room Where Conflicts Exist

Have you ever run into an issue setting up a recurring meeting on a conference room, but the whole series of meetings were declined due to a single conflict? It unfortunately is a normal issue for most organizations. This article is going to show you a couple ways to circumvent this behavior. Within PowerShell every conference room has a set of triggers that can be set but are not yet available within the Office 365 or Exchange Admin Centers.

The two triggers we are interested in are the following:

• ConflictPercentageAllowed
• MaximumConflictInstances

The parameter ConflictPercentageAllowed specifies the maximum percentage of meeting conflicts for new recurring meeting requests. This is set as a percentile so the allowable value for this parameter is 0 to 100. For example, if the value is set to “0” and the recurring meeting hits a conflict, it will be automatically declined. But if you have a value of 50 and you setup a recurring meeting with 10 instances and only 4 of those are conflict, the conflicts will be declined but the meetings in a free slot will be accepted because it didn’t hit the threshold.

The parameter MaximumConflictInstances specifies the maximum number of conflicts for new recurring meeting requests when the AllowRecurringMeetings parameter is set to $true. If the value is set to “0”, no conflicts are permitted for new recurring meeting requests. However, if the value is set to “5”, you have that many conflicts before the series is declined.

How to set the parameter

• Connect to Office 365 PowerShell using the following commands:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

$UserCredential = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

• Pull up the details of the Conference Room calendar:

Get-CalendarProcessing -identity “Conference Room” | fl

• Look at the values for parameters ConflictPercentageAllowed and MaximumConflictInstances
• Change the value of either parameter to what you require via PowerShell

Example

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity “Conference Room” -ConflictPercentageAllowed 50

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity “Conference Room” -MaximumConflictInstances 5

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