Introduction

The Synergy SKY Software can process and provide buttons for externally sent meetings as well. This helps keep your users expectations and meeting workflow consistent, even without being the party to send meeting invitations. Microsoft will only process meeting requests for meetings booked by external users if the settings ProcessExternalMeetingMessages is set to “$true”.  However, enabling this setting potentially exposes your meeting rooms from being booked directly by external users. This article will show you two ways to keep the external meeting processing, and mitigate the concern of external users booking your rooms.

Note: Enabling ProcessExternalMeetingMessages does not in any way expose the information of existing meetings to external users.

Prerequisites

Configuration Reference

• Integration Settings

Step by Step Guide

There are two ways in which you can mitigate the issue of uncontrolled external booking:

• Stop direct emails from external users from ever reaching the room mailboxes; which can be done by a transport rule in the Hub Transport server in Microsoft Exchange. The rule can be set to stop emails from external users from reaching the mailboxes in a specific distribution list like the list of meeting rooms
• Change the alias of the rooms to a domain that is only available internally in the Exchange
  environment; e.g. changing boardroom@acme.com to boardroom@acme.local. The acme.local domain should not be reachable from the outside, but will be available for internal users.

Either of these changes will enable users to forward invitations they receive from the outside to their meetings rooms, while hindering any external users from booking their meeting rooms directly.

Related Articles

• How To: Configure a Microsoft Exchange Transport Rule