Brand

Need more help? Email us at: hi@getaroomapp.com

How does Get a Room integrate with Outlook?

Get a Room allows you to publish your Get a Room schedule to Outlook.

Administrators can share a private internet calendar subscription link with users that allows them to view the reservations made in Get a Room inside their native Outlook calendar. This is can also be known as a ICAL or ICS link.

All the reservations inside the Get a Room calendar are published and are visible in the Outlook calendar.

When reservations are created, modified or deleted in Get a Room, those changes will be published to the Outlook calendars, with updates every fifteen minutes.

However, you cannot make changes to any reservations in Outlook.

You can setup the feed to be viewed in two ways: a tabbed view and a side-by-side column view, as illustrated below.

Outlook Column View

Outlook Tabbed View

Public Calendar

Tip: If you are just looking for a simple way to share a read-only view of your Get a Room calendar, then you can use the Public Calendar Address option in Get a Room. This allows you to share a link with users which allows them to view the calendar, but not make any changes. You can also configure their ability to see basic event details.

Outlook for Mac

Outlook for Mac does not provide a native option for adding Internet calendars from its user interface.

Workaround for customers with access to OWA (Webmail)

If you have OWA (Webmail) at your organization, it should be possible to add an internet calendar to your Outlook for Mac. Add the calendar through the OWA and then the calendar should appear and sync automatically in your Outlook. Once displayed in your Outlook application, you should then be able to rename the calendar and change views as needed.

According to this article at the EUI the Full display version of OWA needs to be used, not the Light/Low vision version.

If you don't have access to OWA then you will not be able to sync with Get a Room using an internet calendar with Outlook for Mac.

Why can't the synchronization be both ways?

Get a Room offers a richness of business rules and validations that many of our customers use to manage their space more effectively. Generally, customers adopt Get a Room as their authoritative system for conference room bookings - this gives the best outcome and access to our full feature set.

As we don't currently offer a native integration for Outlook, we are unable to provide a way for users to make bookings in Get a Room through Outlook. This may change in the future, but at this time we are unable to offer this feature.

Consider some of our business rules:

  • Room permissions
  • Maximum number of hours per day, week, month
  • Amount of credit remaining
  • Business hours
  • Maximum reservation duration
  • Maximum booking window range
  • Reservation lock out period

Outlook has no awareness of our business rules. Outlook would not prevent a user from making a reservation in the calendar at a time that is not available to them - either because the time is already booked by another user or there is a business rule violation.