Why can't I join Meetings from External Exchange Organizations?

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Joining Video Conferences hosted by external Exchange Organizations 

You have now setup your Microsoft Teams Room system, Zoom Room system or any other Video conferencing endpoint and want to join meetings from external organization using One button to Push.

But you find out anytime you forward the meeting to the Mailbox/Calendar for the room nothing ever shows up on the Calendar.  Sound familiar?

The reason is because resource room mailboxes do not accept external calendar requests by default due to security considerations. This extends to both directly addressed or forwarded invites to the the video endpoint room's mailbox/calendar.

 We can confirm the 'resource room mailbox' does not allow external processing of calendar requests by running the following command.  This is just an example and your resource mailboxes names will likely be different.

 Get-CalendarProcessing "MTR" | fl Process* 


To enable the Exchange resource room mailbox to receive external invites or forwarded invites from an external Exchange organization we can simply run the following PowerShell Cmdlet:

Set-CalendarProcessing "MTR" -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True


If we want to get fancy and have an additional layer of security we can specify that all calendar invites to the resource room mailbox must be approved by a moderator first. 

 To enable moderation on the mailbox we run the following cmdlet: 

 Set-Mailbox MTR -ModerationEnabled $True -ModeratedBy 'admin' 

Note: -Moderatedby can be specified  by Name, Alias, Distinguished name (DN), Canonical DN, Email address, GUID

But you may not want to wait for a moderator to approve internal Meeting requests from trusted users/senders. 

 Microsoft Exchange Provides an additional attribute to allow trusted senders to bypass the moderator approval with -BypassModerationFromSendersOrMembers parameter.

 Now that we enabled external invites to the Video endpoints resource room mailbox and secured the mailbox with a moderator(s) we can enable trusted internal users or groups to bypass this setting to avoid any moderation approval delays for internal meetings. 

 In this example I created a TrustedUsers Distribution group and placed all my trusted schedulers, senders, etc. in it.  I then ran the following PowerShell cmdlet

 Set-Mailbox MTR -BypassModerationFromSendersOrMembers 'TrustedUsers'

 In summary we:

 1. Enabled the video conferencing resource room mailbox to receive forwarded external 
    requests
2. Secured the mailbox by specifying a Moderator so no external meeting requests from
    outside the Organization can book the room directly and forcing a moderator to approve.
3. We created a DL of internal safe organizers that can bypass the moderator approval for 
    booking the Video conferencing room resource.


Thanks for reading and have a great day!




Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 21, 2020 at 12:21 AM

    Useful. If I understand well: an external user send an invitation to a colleague, the colleague forward this meeting to the teams room account but it won't be showed on the system because of the resource room doesn't accept calendar, indeed I run the powershell cmdlets to enable the environment and if I authorize through powershell the user who is going to forward invitation it will be accepted by the room system? If it works I could think to enable all the assistant and the Service Desk to able to forward meeting invitation. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

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