By default, when you create a room mailbox (to represent a meeting room) in Exchange Online, it sets a bunch of permissions and properties by default. A few months ago, we moved our meeting room management from a custom app to Exchange Online. And while it works a little bit better, we had a number of features in our custom app that we started missing on Exchange.
NUMBER ONE of these features was the ability to see who had booked a room and for what purpose. Now by default, Exchange doesn’t set the properties and permissions to enable this. Here is how to make it work. You will need Powershell and you will need to delve into the fun world of command line scripting.
First connect to Exchange Online using Powershell. Here is a tutorial on how that is done. Once you are in, you need to execute a couple of simple commands:
Set-MailboxFolderPermission meeting.room.alias:\calendar -user default -accessrights LimitedDetails
Of course, meeting.room.alias above is the alias for you room mailbox. This will immediately start showing details about the meeting room in the meeting room calendar instead of just the free/busy indicator.
Now, in order to get this to show subject details as well, you need alter another property on the mailbox. By default, when a meeting is created with a meeting room location, the location mailbox adds the name of the person who booked the room to the subject and deletes the subject itself. So by only executing the above statement, you will show only the name of the person who booked the room. If you would like to see also the subject of the meeting then you have to execute the following command:
Set-CalendarProcessing meeting.room.alias -DeleteSubject $false
Of course, if you Bing/Google that command, you will see that there are other properties that you can tweak to change what is displayed in the room mailbox calendar. Also, the changes caused by the second command only become available for future meetings, and none of the past meetings will be changed.
Hope that helped.