Features, prerequisites & limitations

Audience: Facility managers, IT, project teams

This page lists what Reservation Sync supports today for Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar, what must be in place, and what is not supported.

• Features
• Feature overview
• Prerequisites
• Limitations
  • General
  • Asset features not supported for synchronized rooms in 3rd party tools
  • Recurring reservations
  • Multi-room reservations
• SLA - Synchronization timing

Features

The following features are included:

• Room-centric synchronization: reservations are linked to rooms in Exchange/Google Workspace; changes on either side are reflected on both. See Room-centric synchronization explained

• Single reservations: created in any Workplace touchpoint or in Outlook/Google Calendar, synchronized with date, time, duration and attendees.

• Recurring reservations: created in Workplace or Outlook/Google Calendar; all occurrences are synchronized.

• Multi-room reservations: several rooms in one reservation (single or recurring), created in Outlook/Google Calendar or in Asset.

• Conflict management (Exchange): conflict detection to prevent double reservations, and optional failure-notification e-mails for administrators. See Conflicts & Reconciliation for Microsoft Exchange

• Near real-time updates: see Sync timing and delays Sync timing & delays

• Several Exchange environments can be connected to one Spacewell environment.

• Online meeting links: Teams, Google Meet, Zoom. See Online meeting links (Teams, Google Meet, Zoom)

• Room Finder add-in for Outlook. See Room Finder Add-in for Outlook

Feature overview

For more information what is possible, see Room-centric synchronization explained

For example scenarios, see Room-centric calendar integration: example scenarios

Prerequisites

• Access to the room calendars (not to personal calendars – people are invited to the meeting as participants).

• Rooms set up the same way in both systems. Room and workplace names and capacity are not updated automatically between Asset and Exchange/Google Workspace; change them manually in Asset too. Settings such as "reserve the meeting room in advance until X" and regimes in Asset must match the working hours and reservation settings in Exchange, to avoid conflicts.

• Every room (and workplace, if applicable) in Exchange belongs to at least one room list.

• Configuration aligned between Asset and Exchange/Google: authorization levels, regimes, maximum number of recurring occurrences, etc.

• Reservations in the past are not taken into account when Reservation Sync is activated.

• Users can keep their local time zone in Outlook; no UTC setting is needed.

Limitations

General

• The organizer must be a real user in the synchronized Exchange environment, not an external e-mail address (Microsoft Graph API limitation).

• Services (e.g. catering) and equipment (e.g. a flipchart) cannot be added via Outlook/Google Calendar. They also cannot be added in Workplace to a reservation created in Outlook, although this feature will be supported soon. 

• A reservation can only be changed or cancelled in the system where it was created. Exceptions are the room actions described in Room-centric synchronization explained

• When a meeting is forwarded, the new people are not added as participants in Asset. Add them as attendees and send an update to all (Microsoft Graph API limitation).

• Reservations with status Draft in Asset are not synchronized; reservations with status Requested are. That is why approval workflows are not supported: if a reservation stays in Draft for too long, the organizer may think the room is booked while it is not.

• Meetings set up as "delegated" in Exchange are ignored.

• Existing future reservations are not picked up automatically; the Spacewell Integration team moves them as a planned activity. See Moving existing reservations (Exchange activation or migration)

Asset features not supported for synchronized rooms in 3rd party tools

• Composed meeting rooms and room compositions

• Blocked dates, regimes

• Set-up and clean-up times before and after a meeting

• Reserving a meeting room in advance from a pre-defined period

• Conflict tolerance policy

Recurring reservations

• Series without an end date are not supported.
• Maximum 360 occurrences per series. In the Integration Platform, Max Occurrences is a Sync Setting with default 180. Longer series are not synchronized.

• Outlook "day 31" is not supported; use "last day of the month".

Multi-room reservations

• Maximum 100 rooms per reservation.

• Removing the last room from a meeting cancels it.

SLA - Synchronization timing

Reservations don't always sync instantly between Workplace and Outlook. Depending on the direction, a change can take a short time to appear in the other system.

Microsoft does not give SLAs for the time it takes between an event (e.g. a new or update reservation) to occur in Outlook and the Graph API delivering the change notification. However, as mentioned below, we noticed it can take up to 3 minutes for the change to be available in the Graph API message towards Spacewell.

For details, see Sync timing & delays