How to Sync Conference Room Calendars Between Organizations

Sharing conference room calendars between organizations is challenging. This becomes even more challenging when organizations use different calendar providers, i.e., one organization uses Google Calendar and the other uses Outlook.

In this article, we’ll explain in detail how to sync conference room calendars between organizations, making it easy for employees from multiple organizations to stay updated with the availability of all conference rooms, avoiding scheduling conflicts and confusion.

Can you natively share conference rooms between organizations using Outlook and Google Calendar?

Unfortunately, sharing conference room calendars with organizations using Outlook and Google Calendar is impossible.

Although you can export a Google Calendar into Outlook and vice versa, it doesn’t mean you can see the availability of the meeting room when trying to book a meeting room.

Example:

Acme Inc. is a corporation that uses Outlook to manage its conference rooms. These conference rooms are also used by Wayne Enterprise, which uses Google Calendar. Acme Inc. can export the meeting room calendars one by one and import them into Google Calendar.

Still, when an employee of Wayne Enterprises tries to use the ‘Find a Time’ feature on Google Calendar to book a room, they won’t be able to see when the conference room is free, as Google Calendar only checks for availability on the primary calendar. The conference room is a secondary (imported) calendar.

If you still want to try out manually exporting these conference rooms, please follow our previous articles on:

• How to sync Outlook Calendar with Google Calendar
• How to sync multiple Google Calendars
• How to Sync multiple Outlook Calendars

Generally, aside from the main problem that you can’t view the availability when exporting calendars, this solution has multiple issues:

• The sync is not real-time. If Acme Inc. creates a meeting in a conference room on Outlook, it might take up to 24 hours for that meeting to reflect in Wayne Enterprises’ Google Calendar.
• Limited Privacy Options: Even when the meeting room booking is reflected, you have little control over what event properties you want to sync from one calendar to another. Since you’re sharing the calendars from one organization to another, you might want more control over what’s shared.

How to automatically sync meeting/conference rooms between organizations in real time?

To automatically sync your conference rooms between organizations in real-time, you must use a Calendar Sync Tool like OneCal.

With OneCal, you can connect and sync multiple Outlook and Google Calendars in real-time.

This method bypasses the issues explained above because OneCal uses the official Outlook and Google Calendar APIs to directly clone the conference room meetings from one calendar to another.

If you then use the ‘Find a Time’ feature on Google Calendar or Outlook, you can see the full availability of your conference rooms, as the meetings are synced in the primary calendars.

Automatically sync meeting rooms using these steps:

1. Create an account for free at OneCal (no credit card is needed): You can sign up to OneCal for free and try out the platform for 2 weeks at no charge.
   
2. Connect all your conference room calendars and the calendars you want to share these conference rooms to: OneCal offers a modular calendar sync software, allowing you to sync from one conference room to another or sync multiple conference rooms simultaneously.
   
3. Click ‘Start New Sync’: After connecting all your calendars, the next step is to start syncing each conference room between difference organizations. For this example, I’ve chosen two companies, Acme Inc. and Wayne Enterprises, where we’ll sync each conference room between both organizations.
   
4. Give the sync a name and a direction: The name is just an identifier to help you distinguish the syncs from one another. The sync direction dictates where the events are coped from and where to.
   One-way: Events go from one calendar to another (one source, multiple destinations).
   Multi-way: Events go both ways; if you select n number of calendars, those calendars always stay in sync.
   For this example, we’ll select multi-way, as we want to keep conference rooms in sync between Acme Inc. and Wayne Enterprises.
   
5. Select the conference rooms to keep in sync: The second step is to select the conference rooms we want to keep in sync. After selecting the calendars, click ‘Next’.
   
6. Select what to sync between conference rooms: OneCal offers a customizable calendar sync, allowing you to choose which event properties you can sync from a conference room to another. You can sync event names, description, meeting links, assign them colors, and much more.
   
   For the sake of keeping the example simple, we’ll only sync the event titles, and assign the synced events a color.
   
7. Click ‘Start Sync’: To complete the setup of syncing multiple conference rooms between organizations, click ‘Start Sync’;
   

Your Conference Rooms are now synced between two organizations!

You can follow the steps showcased above to sync more conference rooms. Depending on your needs, you can choose to mark all conference events private or configure the sync differently than we did. What’s important is that the conference rooms will stay in sync automatically, in real-time.

Here is how a setup syncing multiple meeting rooms between two organizations would look like:

For any further questions about setting up your conference room calendar sync, you can reach out to contact@onecal.io directly, we’ll do our best to help you out.

Use OneCal to sync conference rooms in real-time

OneCal is the most reliable calendar sync platform for syncing conference rooms. Our customers use our system to sync hundreds of conference rooms across different locations, saving time and improving communication between multiple organizations.

Sign up for OneCal for free; no need for a credit card or further commitment to start syncing your meeting rooms.