Efficiently managing meeting rooms and shared facilities is essential in a hybrid workplace. While the Personal Calendar Integration simplifies the process for employees to locate and book meeting rooms, with the introduction of the Room Calendar Integration - specifically designed for room calendars - we aim to provide you with advanced meeting room analytics that are independent of individual user actions.
In this article, you'll discover how the Room Calendar Integration enhances facility management, learn about its setup and management of room calendars within Mapiq, and understand the safeguards in place for data security.
Note: The Room Calendar Integration is available to customers on a Premium or Enterprise plan. In the future, we may introduce additional functionalities based on this integration, such as no-show reports, which would provide valuable insights but require the Occupancy Add-On since these reports would rely on a combination of booking and occupancy data.
If you're unsure whether the Occupancy Add-On is included in your package or if you would like to acquire it, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Personal Calendars vs. Room Calendars
The Room Calendar Integration sets itself apart from the Personal Calendar Integration by providing Mapiq with instant and secure access to room calendars. This access is achieved without compromising user privacy or granting access to sensitive information like meeting titles, descriptions, and attachments. By utilizing this access, Mapiq can provide valuable insights on optimizing shared facilities, especially when combined with sensor data.
It's important to note that, unlike the Personal Calendar Integration, the Room Calendar Integration does not allow employees to book rooms directly within Mapiq. We recommend using both integrations for maximum benefits.
Analytics & Insights
By securely accessing room calendars, Mapiq can provide valuable insights into the usage of shared facilities, especially when combined with sensor data.
The Room Calendar Integration offers several key insights and functionalities, including:
Real-time access to room calendars, along with historical data.
Insights into booking rates, groups using rooms, and ad hoc vs. planned meetings.
Information on your most and least popular meeting rooms based on booking data.
Learn more about these new insights here:
Managing Room Calendars in Mapiq
To activate the Room Calendar integration and connect your Microsoft 365 Room Calendars to Mapiq, head over to the Settings tab in the admin portal and follow our detailed guide on how to enable and set up the integration, which can be found here: Connecting Your M365 Room Calendar(s) with Mapiq.
After successfully setting up the integration, administrators can access a comprehensive overview of all configured and synchronized room calendars through the admin portal. To ensure successful synchronization, it is necessary to add the email address of each room to the room data under the Building Tab > Meeting Rooms:
Synced vs. Not Synced Rooms
Mapiq always tries to sync rooms with registered email addresses. Administrators can easily view a list of synced rooms and those that couldn't be synced, along with the reasons for any syncing errors:
Privacy & Security
The Room Calendar Integration allows Mapiq to gather information about room usage. However, sensitive details like meeting titles, invite text, attachments, etc., are not accessible.
Data Storage
By integrating your M365 Room calendars with Mapiq, you provide us with the permission to read and write various attributes in the room calendar for each meeting. The following table provides a summary of the accessible attributes when using the 'Calendars.ReadWrite' permission:
Attribute | Description | Accessible | Stored |
| The attachments in the meeting invite | No* | No |
| The title of the meeting invite | No* | No |
| The text of the meeting invite | No* | No |
| All event invitees and response statuses | Yes | Yes |
| The organizer of the event | Yes | Yes |
| Start date and time of the event | Yes | Yes |
| End date and time of the event | Yes | Yes |
| When the event was originally created | Yes | Yes |
| When the event was last updated | Yes | Yes |
| The location(s) of the event | Yes | Yes |
| If the meeting is recurring (and to which meeting series the event belongs) | Yes | Yes |
| The sensitivity level of the meeting: normal, personal, private, confidential. | Yes | Yes |
| The URL to the online meeting | Yes | No** |
* By default, Microsoft removes attachments and body text from meetings and replaces the original meeting title with the organizer's display name. This means that Mapiq cannot access this sensitive data. There is a possibility that your organization has changed this default behavior using calendar processing options (see Microsoft Documentation for more details). If you are unsure about your organization's settings, consult with your Exchange Online administrator for clarification.
** Mapiq does not store the meeting URL itself. However, it does store a flag indicating whether the meeting has online capabilities.
While there are other attributes accessible to Mapiq, not all of them are relevant. For example, non-sensitive attributes like the unique ID of the meeting or meeting settings such as reminders being on are accessible but not processed or stored by Mapiq.
For a comprehensive list of attributes, please refer to Microsoft's documentation on the Event Resource Type
Encryption & Network Security
The database encrypts all data using AES-256 encryption while at rest. Data transmissions are also encrypted with TLS 1.2. Only authorized service administrators with an administrative account and MFA enabled can access the data in the production database. The database is protected by a firewall and can only be accessed from Mapiq's internal Azure network.
Google Room Calendars
The first version of this integration primarily supports Microsoft 365 Room calendars. However, future updates may include the option to add Google Room calendars as well.
💬 Need More Help?
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