How to limit meeting length for room calendars in Office 365

Setting up your Robin account?

You’ll find the most up-to-date information in our Help Center.‍

FYI: This is for rooms calendars that have been set up as meeting rooms in Office 365. If you haven't done that part already, now is a great time to start.

We have a quick guide for configuring meeting room calendars here. Once you're done, come back here for the next step.

When your office has many meeting rooms and a growing team, it gets harder to make sure everyone schedules them appropriately. Fortunately Office 365 gives you the power to make your meeting room calendar do some of the work for you. ‍

This guide will show you how to make room calendars only accept meetings under a certain length.

‍From the meeting room page, click on a room to bring up details in the sidebar. Click on "Booking Options" to open a new window.

Customizing Office 365 Meeting Room Booking Options

For reasons that I can't explain, this link opens "Booking delegates" by default so you'll need to click on the sidebar option for "booking options" to see the following screen:

When you first create a meeting room, it has a few limitations by default. Unless you book multi-day seminars years in advance, you probably weren't aware of them. The normal event limit is a day, which for most rooms is longer than needed. For high traffic areas, you might want to set a limit of 3 hours. In the (hopefully) rare event of a longer meeting you can always make an exception.

Extra Options to Improve Room Scheduling

A couple other highlights you might want to change while here

   
• Ban recurring meetings: One of the biggest sources of conference room conflicts we see is repeating meetings that don't actually take place. By eliminating them as an option, you'll make sure that all meetings taking place were planned for specifically, and not just a surviving legacy from months ago.
• Limit advance booking window: Some offices have stricter policies for scheduling meetings in advance. If you need to keep tight control over your meeting rooms, try dropping the maximum lead time to 30 days. This way anyone needing to schedule farther out will need to confirm with an office admin, and if events change (as they often do that far in advance) you're less likely to forget about it.
   

These settings only effect the meeting room you selected, so feel free to change them if you have different kinds of rooms throughout the office.