Monday, April 15, 2019

Avoid double-booking rooms in Calendar

What’s changing

Rooms will no longer accept two Calendar events that overlap in time.

Previously, if an event was created directly on a room’s calendar by someone with manage permissions for the resource, the room would accept this meeting even if another event had already added this room for that same time period.

Now, if the room has already accepted another meeting, creating a new event at the same time directly on the room’s calendar will result in a room decline of this conflicting meeting.

Who’s impacted

End users

Why this matters

This means that you’ll no longer have to scramble to find an alternative room if your meeting room was double-booked.

How to get started


  • Admins: No action required.
  • End users: No action required, this behavior will happen automatically.

Additional details

This change in behavior only impacts future room bookings. Existing events will not be impacted.

Workarounds

Option 1: Long room hold
For situations where you’d like a long room hold (such as an all day event) where you’d like to schedule individual sessions in the same room, we recommend the following work around:

  • Create a long hold booking of the desired room.
  • Create the individual sessions, where you write in the location field or description the room location; for example. “Room A [Separate room hold].”
Manually overwrite the Hangout information for the individual sessions with the Hangout ID of the long hold.

Option 2: Manually accept all room bookings and double bookings
Should you require double bookings for a particular use case, you can turn-off the room’s auto-responder completely. This will mean all invitations are added on a room’s calendar awaiting response. Room admins with manage permissions can manually accept or decline all invitations including accepting of double-bookings.

  • In Calendar, hover over the room’s calendar in your calendar list
  • Open the Calendar Settings by clicking on  the three-dot menu and selecting Settings
  • Go to the section “Auto-accept invitations”
  • Select Automatically add all invitations to this calendar

Availability

Rollout details


G Suite editions
Available to all G Suite editions.

On/off by default?
This feature will be ON by default.

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