By default Office 365 will only show free/busy when users are viewing a meeting room calendar. You can alter this to show the subject instead by running a few simple PowerShell commands.

Description

The issue here can be solved by addressing the two separate issues which causes this behaviour:

1. The default user does not have sufficient permissions to view anything besides free/busy
2. The processing rules for the meeting room calendar makes the calendar not even save the subject

The second issue here means that even though the user has sufficient permissions he won’t see the subject as it is not there. When we alter this users will not see the subject for already created meetings – unless they are updated by the user, forcing the meeting room mailbox to re-accept the meeting. It will only apply to future meetings.

In this example Johhny User has created a meeting at Meeting Room 1 for the accounting team.

In his own calendar he can of course see the subject and all details. All is well. When opening the Meeting Room 1 calendar he only sees “Busy”.

Solution

First we need to run the following lines of code to connect to Exchange Online.

$UserCredential = Get-Credential
$ExchangeSession = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $ExchangeSession

Once we are connected we can run these PowerShell command towards the mailbox in question, meetingrom1@o365admin.tips. The first line will set the permissions for the default user to Reviewer, giving all users permission to read all items in the meeting room calendar. The second line will set the calendar processing rules in order to not delete the subject upon accepting the meeting.

Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity meetingroom1@o365admin.tips:\Calendar -User default -AccessRights Reviewer
Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity meetingroom1@o365admin.tips -DeleteSubject $False -AddOrganizerToSubject $True

That’s all! Now the meeting room calendar will show the meeting subject instead of busy. If you don’t want to add the meeting organizer to the subject you can of course set this to $False instead. Johnny User rescheduled the meeting after the processing rules were altered, causing the calendar to now show the subject for his meeting.

Users will now see the following when viewing the Meeting Room 1 calendar.