With the Calendar Email Extension it’s possible to book Exchange rooms and equipment directly from a SharePoint Calendar.
Recently one of our customers wanted to know if it’s possible to change the email address that Exchange resources reply to and to forward the reply to the event organizer instead.
Unfortunately there is no easy solution for this, because it not possible to add an additional reply to address other than the configured service account, but there is a possible workaround that I would like to explain in this post.
The workaround
Please note that this workaround will only work with the latest version of the Calendar Email Extension (2017-02-17). If you haven’t installed this version yet, download the latest version, run the setup and choose repair after the system check. After the setup is complete, restart the SharePoint Timer Service on all servers in the SharePoint farm.
Basically what we would like to achieve in this workaround is to forward all replies from Exchange resources to the email address of the SharePoint calendar. The reply will then be forwarded to users specified in the Forward Status Reply To column automatically.
First let’s take a look at the credentials settings of the ‘Exchange Room and Resource Selector’ column.
In the Exchange Room and Resource Selector column you have to configure a service account that is used to communicate with Exchange. You can configure the service account credentials in the Secure Store Service application or you can enter user name and password directly. Then you have to configure, if you want to use the configured user to book resources or if you want to add events directly to resource calendar. Please note that this workaround will only work with the option ‘use the configured user to book resources’.
If this option is used, the add-on will use the Exchange calendar of the service account to book the resources, therefore replies will be sent to this account. In order to change the recipient, we would like to redirect replies to the email address of the SharePoint calendar instead of the service account.
Create an Exchange contact for the SharePoint calendar address
If you have already configured an Exchange contact for the SharePoint calendar, you can ignore this step. You should already have an Exchange contact, if you use the advanced e-mail address option in the Calendar Email Extension settings. If you don’t have a contact yet, please create a new mail contact in Exchange with the SharePoint calendar’s email address as the external address.
Create an Exchange transport rule to redirect the replies to the SharePoint calendar
Finally create a new transport rule in Exchange that redirects messages sent to the service account, which is used to book resources, to the new mail contact, which has the email address of the SharePoint Calendar configured. In addition you can also select the service account again, to make sure the service account and the SharePoint calendar receive all e-mails.
ServiceAccount -> ServiceAccount and SharePoint Calendar
As a result, if you now book an Exchange resource, the reply will be forwarded to the SharePoint calendar and from there to the users specified in the ‘Forward Attendee Status Reply To’ column.
I hope you found this information useful. If you have any problems or any other questions, please send an e-mail to support@sharepointsapiens.com or post a comment.
