Adding exchange room calendars to iPad

Question

I am trying to get an iPad to list Exchange room resources in its calendar.

I have set up an account for the iPad to connect to exchange with it's own mailbox. This account has full access to the room resources (this was mainly for my ease of testing).

As these are resources rather than mailboxes, I cannot simply add the additional accounts as exchange accounts.

I have tried sharing the calendars as .ics but cannot do this as it would appear a user can only do this to their own account.

I have tried using OWA but as this is an iPad, it can only do it in the stripped down version and hence I cannot add extra calendars.

Is there any way to achieve what I am after that I'm overlooking?

Answer 1

Solved.

The vast majority of this is PowerShell script. (Start > Powershell Modules)

First of all you need to set up the web proxy: (to be honest, I skipped this bit as the iPad in question will never leave the building and an external URL isn't required)

To check settings:

Get-ExchangeServer |fl

To set setting:

Set-ExchangeServer -Identity "MAIL01" -InternetWebProxy "<Webproxy URL>"

Next, the virtual calendar directory needs to be set to shared:

To check settings:

get-owavirtualdirectory |fl

To set setting:

Set-OwaVirtualDirectory -Identity "CAS01" -ExternalUrl "<URL for the CAS01>" -CalendarPublishingEnabled $true

Next, in the Exchange Management Console, go into Organisation Configuration > Mailbox and create a new policy. Set the domain to Anonymous (this is the bit that threw me as I assumed using the * wildcard for domain would do what I was after but no!) and the sharing settings to Calendar sharing with free/busy information and whatever level of access you want to give people.

Assign the new policy to the resource mailbox:

Set-Mailbox -Identity <mailbox alias> -SharingPolicy "<sharing policy>"

Enable publishing on the calendar:

Set-MailboxCalendarFolder -Identity <mailbox alias>:\Calendar -detaillevel fulldetails -publishenabled $true -reseturl

At this point you can see the mailbox's url (both as an html to view and an ics to subscribe to) by running:

get-mailboxcalendarfolder -Identity <mailbox alias>:\calendar

At this point, I believe it's sorted. As an added extra though I figured out how to send an email from the calendar account. First log into OWA as you would normally (note, your account needs to have a level of control of the room account. I had mine set to full control and send as), then change the url to https://<OWA url>/owa/<full email address of room>/#

Apologies for any lack of detail or terminology. Hope it all makes sense.

Answer 2

It looks like you'd want to create an account with delegate access to the room mailbox, then add that account.

Answer 3

Check out CalendarONE

It enables you to add all your shared Exchange calendars to the native iOS calendar.