Room Calendar Sync with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace

Imagine Marta, the office manager of a 150-person company. It is Tuesday, 9:58. Two groups are standing at the door of the meeting room on the third floor. The sales team booked it last week in Outlook, the way they always have. The product team booked it yesterday in Desk & Park, where they book their desks. Both bookings are valid in their own system, and neither system knew about the other. Marta finds the product team a smaller room and spends the afternoon wondering which tool to ban.

She does not need to ban either. The problem is not that people use two tools; it is that the tools disagree about who has the room. Room calendar sync makes them agree.

What room calendar sync does

Desk & Park connects to the room calendars your organisation already has in Microsoft 365 (the room mailboxes in Exchange) or Google Workspace (the room resources). Once a Desk & Park meeting room is mapped to its room calendar, the sync runs in both directions:

• Desk & Park → room calendar. A room booked in Desk & Park is written into the room's calendar. The sync worker runs every minute, so the booking shows up in Outlook or Google Calendar within minutes, and anyone who looks at the room there sees it as taken.
• Room calendar → Desk & Park. A meeting booked on the mapped room in Outlook or Google Calendar is read back about every five minutes and becomes a Desk & Park reservation, up to 90 days ahead. The organiser is matched by e-mail address, so the meeting appears under the right colleague on the map and in the room's day.
• Changes follow. When a meeting is moved, cancelled or declined by the room, the Desk & Park reservation moves or disappears with it. When a Desk & Park booking is cancelled, the event leaves the room calendar.

For the people booking, nothing changes: sales keep booking in Outlook, the product team keeps booking on the map, and both see the same schedule.

The rule that settles every conflict: the room calendar wins

Two-way sync needs one tie-breaker, and Desk & Park uses the obvious one: the room calendar decides. It is the calendar Exchange or Google already enforce for everyone, with its own acceptance rules, and the one people in Outlook trust.

In practice:

1. If an Outlook meeting is accepted by the room for a slot where a Desk & Park booking exists that has not yet been written to the room calendar, the Desk & Park booking is cancelled.
2. The person who made that booking is told straight away: an in-app notification, an e-mail, and a post in Slack or Microsoft Teams if your organisation uses those channels (see booking notifications in Slack and Teams).
3. A tentative meeting, one the room has not accepted yet, never pushes anybody out. It only takes a slot that is free.

Because Desk & Park bookings reach the room calendar within minutes, the window for such a conflict is short, but it exists.

Privacy in the room calendar

A room calendar is visible to many people, so Desk & Park writes as little as possible into it:

• The meeting subject is hidden by default. The event carries a neutral subject instead of the booking title.
• The booker's e-mail address is never written to the room calendar.

Meetings read back from Outlook or Google follow the same default, so a confidential subject typed in Outlook does not appear on the office map either.

Optional: release rooms nobody shows up to

Every office has the weekly meeting that stopped happening months ago but still blocks the best room. Desk & Park can release a synced room when nobody checks in within a set time after the start, and then decline the Outlook meeting on the room's behalf so the organiser learns the room was freed. This setting is off by default: a room is only released once an administrator turns it on. Because a meeting booked in Outlook can only be checked in to on a tablet next to the room, those meetings are released only in rooms that have one; see meeting-room kiosk tablets.

Setting it up

The connection is made once per organisation, by an administrator, on the room-calendar card in the organisation settings.

Microsoft 365

1. Click Connect Microsoft 365 and sign in as a Global Administrator (or Privileged Role Administrator) of your Microsoft 365 tenant.
2. Grant admin consent to the Desk & Park app in Microsoft Entra. It asks for two application permissions: Calendars.ReadWrite for the events in room calendars and Place.Read.All for the list of rooms.
3. Make sure your rooms are listed in Exchange Places. If the room list in Desk & Park stays empty although the connection works, Places has not been enabled yet; the card shows the hint.

Google Workspace

1. A super administrator adds Desk & Park as a client with domain-wide delegation in the Google Admin console. The card shows the client ID and the scopes to copy.
2. Back in Desk & Park, click Sign in with Google and test the connection.

Then map the rooms. The card lists the room calendars from your directory next to your Desk & Park meeting rooms and suggests matches when names agree. Accept the suggestions, adjust the rest, save. Only mapped rooms are synced; a room left as "not synced" stays a Desk & Park-only room.

Practical tips

• Name rooms the same in both places. "Oslo, 3rd floor" in Exchange and "Oslo" in Desk & Park still need a manual match; identical names are suggested automatically.
• Tell people that both tools are fine. Announce it in one line: "Book rooms wherever you like; they stay in sync."
• Explain the tie-breaker once. People accept a clear rule ("the room calendar wins") far more easily than a booking that seems to vanish.
• Switch on no-show release when rooms are scarce, not before. It is one setting for the whole organisation and applies to every meeting room; a synced room is freed in its calendar too. It pays off when teams queue for rooms and tablets are mounted at the doors; in a quiet building there is nothing to win by releasing meetings.

Scope: what it does not do

Room calendar sync is available on the Pro and Enterprise plans; see pricing. It covers meeting rooms only: desks and parking are not booked from Outlook, and there is no Outlook add-in or Teams app. It does not sync personal calendars in either direction; your own bookings reach your calendar through e-mail invitations, which is a different feature described in desk bookings in your Outlook calendar. An organisation connects one provider, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, not both. And the sync is fast but not instantaneous: changes arrive within minutes. The room schedule and booking flow the sync plugs into are shown on the meeting room booking page.

FAQ

Can employees keep booking meeting rooms in Outlook?

Yes. A meeting booked on a mapped room in Outlook or Google Calendar is read back about every five minutes and becomes a Desk & Park reservation under the organiser, matched by e-mail address. Moves and cancellations in Outlook follow automatically.

What happens if the same room is booked in Outlook and in Desk & Park at the same time?

The room calendar wins. If the room accepts an Outlook meeting over a Desk & Park booking that has not yet been written to the room calendar, the Desk & Park booking is cancelled and its owner is notified in the app, by e-mail and in Slack or Teams if configured. Tentative meetings only take free slots.

Who needs to approve the Microsoft 365 connection?

A Global Administrator (or Privileged Role Administrator) of your Microsoft 365 tenant grants admin consent to the Desk & Park app with the Calendars.ReadWrite and Place.Read.All permissions. The rooms must be listed in Exchange Places. For Google Workspace, a super administrator sets up domain-wide delegation for the Desk & Park service account.

Can we connect Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace at the same time?

No. An organisation uses one provider for room calendar sync, either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.