Before you begin
Officebooking is a cloud-based platform that stores data such as reservations in a database management system. This enables many features, such as searching for available reservations and managing additional services like catering or visitor registration. When synchronizing appointments from Exchange Online, Officebooking uses the Graph API. This is a RESTful interface from Microsoft that allows integrations to subscribe to specific mailboxes (meeting room calendars) to collect reservation information from these calendars.
Once subscribed to the meeting room mailbox, Officebooking receives a notification when a new reservation is created, modified, cancelled, or deleted. Based on this notification, Officebooking checks the room calendar and retrieves the reservation data.
When creating a new reservation in Officebooking, it directly creates a reservation in the Outlook calendar of the meeting room. Changes or cancellations are processed in a similar way.
Cancellation requests
Every night, Officebooking runs a service to synchronize the data between the meeting room mailbox and Officebooking. Recurring meetings are created, and modifications of existing reservations are processed. If the service detects a cancellation that cannot be processed, it creates a cancellation request. You can find the cancellation request on the “Cancellation requests” tab on the reservations page. Officebooking supports two ways of processing these cancellation requests: either process all cancellations automatically or process them manually. You can set this in officeAdmin at the integration tab.
If the “Ignore Cancellation Requests” setting is enabled, all cancellations from Outlook will be processed automatically. When disabled, all cancellation requests will need manual approval.
Trouble shooting calendar differences
Due to the structural differences in storage and processing of meetings between Exchange Online and Officebooking, there may be known events that can cause differences in your calendars. We have implemented a number of “tools” to check these differences and to self-analyze the root cause of these differences.
Office 365 view
In the reservations overview in officeAdmin, we show the “planner.” The planner is a day-by-day overview of all your reservations for a specific location. By selecting “Office 365,” the planner shows all meetings directly from the Outlook calendar of the meeting room. These meetings are marked with a blue color.
Office 365 view
Officebooking view
Switching between both views is a great way to check if there are any differences that might explain why the data is not correct.
Listview
The listview
The list view allows you to search for a specific reservation by filtering on date or free text. By selecting the reservation number, you can see the details of the reservation.
Cancellation requests
Cancellation requests
The “Cancellation requests” tab shows an overview of all reservations that were about to be cancelled within Officebooking. By selecting the “Cancel” button, the reservation is actually cancelled. The external state “100” indicates it is a cancellation request. By selecting the “Get Status Info” button, you can request the original Outlook reservation information.
Company Log
Under settings, there is a “Company Log” button. Here, you can search and filter on any O365 entry, such as cancellations or creation. You can select a specific date or search for an email address.
The data contains the original reservation data from Outlook.
