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The default behavior for auto-processed room reservations is that it will decline a recurring series of meetings if there is a conflict for any of the individual meetings in the series. However, this can be adjusted. Bookings are essentially a commitment by the room that it will be available for the times requested. If the room cannot fulfill each of the times requested by the organizer, it will decline the entire reservation. Otherwise, the room could accept some events and decline others, but this can create confusion for the organizer who thinks they will always have that room reserved for that series.

There are a couple decisions you can make:

  1. Keep the default behavior because it is the most transparent to the organizer and will reduce organizer confusion and room conflicts. You can advise the user to limit their recurring meeting to a set number of meetings in the series. The smaller the series the less likely there will be a conflict.

Or

  1. You can adjust the behavior to accept/decline recurring meetings within a threshold. Note, this can create confusion for the organizer because the meetings in the series that create conflicts will be declined. The organizer must realize that they have the room for some of the series, but not the entire series. Please review this link for example scenarios: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2011/02/07/automatic-processing-of-recurring-meeting-requests-with-conflicting-instances/

If you would like to adjust the thresholds, please see the example powershell cmdlets below. I recommend testing this out with one room before rolling it out to others. Once you set this setting, wait 1 hour before testing to allow the settings to propagate throughout the system. This would be an example process:

  1. Connect to Exchange Online Powershell.
$UserCredential = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

      2. (Optional) Check the existing processing threshold.

Get-CalendarProcessing -Identity "conferenceroom@example.com" | fl *ConflictPercentageAllowed*
Get-CalendarProcessing -Identity "conferenceroom@example.com" | fl *MaximumConflictInstances*   

      3. Set a new threshold.

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "conferenceroom@example.com" -ConflictPercentageAllowed 40
Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "conferenceroom@example.com" -MaximumConflictInstances 6

Keywords: Room Meeting Conflict, Recurring Room Meetings, Outlook Calendar, Office 365