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Provisioning Meeting Room Devices for Office365 Hybrid with Exchange Online

1/18/2017

11 Comments

 
Skype for Business Meeting room devices are gaining popularity in recent months as companies seek to extend the UC capabilities from the PC desktop to meeting spaces such as huddle rooms, small and medium sized meeting rooms and even large conference rooms. Polycom has been providing native Skype for Business meeting room solutions for many years now, such as the popular Polycom Group Series family of video collaboration endpoints, and more recently the Polycom Trio8800 SmartHub which is the successor to the widely used starfish conference phones but with additional video and content sharing capabilities. In addition, Microsoft's partners are soon to launch the Skype Room Systems V2 solution which adds yet another meeting room device that customers can choose from.

This blog post serves as a guide on how to provision these devices in an Office365 Hybrid environment where an on-premise AD is synced with Azure AD along with ADFS deployed, Exchange is purely online and Skype for Business configured with hybrid setup with some users homed on-premise and some online.
The main approach to provisioning these meeting room devices is with an Exchange Room mailbox account along with an on-premise or online Skype for Business account. At the same time, we want to maintain the consistency of using an on-premise AD to sync with Azure AD using AADConnect. With these objectives,  this walkthrough covers the following provide steps to provision a Polycom Trio8800 device:
1. Create an on-premise AD account for the meeting room device and set 'proxyaddress' attribute for SMTP
2. Sync account to Azure AD and assign an E3 license to the account so that the Exchange online mailbox is created
3. Convert the Exchange online mailbox type to 'Room' and set the calendar processing attributes
4. Enable account for Skype for Business on-premise or Online

1. Create an on-premise AD account for the meeting room device and set 'proxyaddress' attribute for SMTP
To begin we simply create a normal user account for the Trio8800 using either powershell or the AD MMC. The user principal name used is Trio8800@ucprimer.com where ucprimer.com is the shared split domain suffix for our hybrid environment. Note that we can also create the account in Azure AD directly, aka a cloud identity but the domain suffix will have a 'onmicrosoft.com' which results in inconsistent naming convention. Once created, we need to modify the proxyaddress attribute to add the "SMTP:trio8800@ucprimer.com" entry so that a consistent email address will be generated in the Exchange online account. Below is the screen shot of this attribute:
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2. Sync account to Azure AD and assign an E3 license to the account so that the Exchange online mailbox is created
To initiate a sync we can import the ADSync module in powershell on our AADConnect server and run the cmdlet Start-ADSyncSyncCycle as shown below:
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Now the account will appear in the list of users in Office365 Azure AD and we can proceed to assign a license as shown on the right:

Note that creating resource mailboxes actually do not require an Exchange online license. However, we still need a Skype for Business online license for these room system accounts. Here we are just assigning a normal user license so that the mailbox gets created automatically. After we convert the mailbox to a resource type, we can remove the Exchange online license and it will still work. However, we need to keep the Skype for Business license since the room system needs to sign-in into a Skype for Business account.
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3. Convert the Exchange online mailbox type to 'Room' and set the calendar processing attributes
Creating the mailbox may take several minutes. Once that is completed, we need to convert the mailbox from a Regular type to Room and also set the necessary calendar processing attributes. To do this we use remote powershell to access the Exchange online tenant and run the cmdlets as shown below:

$cred = Get-Credential
New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic
Import-PSSession -Session $sess -AllowClobber

Set-Mailbox -identity Trio8800 -Type Room

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity Trio8800 -AutomateProcessing AutoAccept -AddOrganizerToSubject $false -AllowConflicts $false -DeleteComments $false -DeleteSubject $false -RemovePrivateProperty $false

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity Trio8800 -AddAdditionalResponse $true -AdditionalResponse "This room has a Polycom Trio8800"

Connect-MsolService -Credential $cred

Set-MsolUser -userPrincipalName trio8800@ucprimer.com -PasswordNeverExpires $true

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3.1 Alternative approach to creating room mailbox directly on Exchange online using remote powershell.
Its worthwhile to note that steps 1-3 can be done by creating the room mailbox directly on Exchange online using remote powershell. This will result in a room account with a cloud-based identity that ends with a 'onmicrosoft.com' suffix but that should not matter for most cases. We will still need to enable the account later so that a Skype for Business online account can be attached. Below are the powershell cmdlets for reference:

New-Mailbox -MicrosoftOnlineServicesID 'MSR300@ucprimer.onmicrosoft.com' -Alias MSR300 -Name "Polycom MSR300" -Room -EnableRoomMailboxAccount $true -RoomMailboxPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -String 'PASSWORD' -AsPlainText -Force)

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity 'MSR300@ucprimer.onmicrosoft.com' -AutomateProcessing AutoAccept -AddOrganizerToSubject $false -AllowConflicts $false -DeleteComments $false -DeleteSubject $false -RemovePrivateProperty $false

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity 'MSR300@ucprimer.onmicrosoft.com' -AddAdditionalResponse $true -AdditionalResponse "This is a Skype Meeting room!"
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4. Enable account for Skype for Business on-premise or Online
Now that we've created the mailbox, we can proceed to create a Skype for Business account for the room system. This is done using the powershell cmdlet Enable-CsMeetingRoom. For an on-premise account, we simply run the Skype for Business powershell cmdlet on one of the Front End Servers.  For eg:
Enable-CsMeetingRoom -SipAddress "sip:pgroup700@sipdomain.com" -domaincontroller dc.domain.local -RegistrarPool fepool.domain.local -Identity Trio8800
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To enable the room system on Skype for Business Online, we run remote powershell into the SfB tenant and first get the registrar FQDN using a Get-CsOnlineUser cmdlet and then we run Enable-CsMeetingRoom just like the for the on-premise account:

Get-CsOnlineUser -Identity 'user@domain.com'| fl *registrarpool*
Enable-CsMeetingRoom -Identity trio8800@ucprimer.com -RegistrarPool 'sippoolsg20f03.infra.lync.com -SipAddressType EmailAddress


Example is shown below:
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Conclusion
This blog posts walks through the steps required to provision Exchange Online and Skype for Business accounts for meeting room devices for either Skype for Business On-premise or Online. The steps are applicable for meeting room solutions such as the Polycom Group Series, Polycom Trio Collaboration SmartHub and the upcoming Polycom MSR Skype Room Systems.
11 Comments
Primož link
8/11/2017 01:31:52 am

First of all thanks for your blog. In my environment all works fine except newly created Skype for Business on-line 'Room' mailbox is not visible for Exchange On-premise in GAL. Can you help me?

Reply
Brennon link
8/16/2017 12:58:13 am

Hi Primoz

Are you using Skype for Business online with Exchange on-premise? This is not supported by SRSv2 at this time. When using Skype for Business Online, Exchange must also be online.

Reply
John
8/8/2018 05:33:39 am

Hello, can you advise what to do if we have Exchange Hybrid with AD Sync, and only Skype for Business Online (no Skype on-prem)?

Reply
Brennon link
8/10/2018 01:36:41 am

Hi John

The example shown here is for Exchange Online and Skype for Business accounts for meeting room devices for either Skype for Business On-premise or Online. If you have Exchange Hybrid it is your choice to create the resource mailbox online or onprem. The steps are similar.

Reply
Gage Poon link
8/20/2018 11:43:25 pm

Web Conference Calls is taking advantage of the Internet's two most notable qualities of sharing information and connecting people from around the globe. As per Esco.systems whether it's joining an online training session, initiating an online brainstorming session, or reviewing a meeting that was missed, conferencing and "meeting" online has never been easier with Skype4B and Polycom.

Reply
Korbyn Forsman
11/23/2018 10:33:07 am

Query, if you have setup the Exchange Online Meeting room with a Skype Onprem user account, (not csMeetingRoom) can you move said Skype account from onPrem to SFBO? I keep getting "HostedMigration fault: Error=(201)" when I try to move the account up.

Reply
Brennon link
11/27/2018 08:09:26 pm

Hi Korbyn

This should work. The SFB on-prem user can be moved to SFBO regardless whether the associated mailbox type is room or user. I assume the account is AD Synced from your on-prem AD to AzureAD. If you cant use powershell to move the user, try using the SFB Control Panel instead. Hope this helps

Reply
Aleksandrs
4/3/2019 02:01:17 am

Hi,
Maybe you can advise regarding calendar processing, as device gets "Unable to fetch calendar" error.
Skype itself is working great. Can this be related to mfa enabled?

Reply
Brennon Kwok link
4/14/2019 10:46:25 pm

Hi Aleksandrs

MFA should be bypassed for the phones and room devices accounts to be able to access Exchange calendar. There is no mechanism for these devices to be able to handle 2FA at this time

Reply
YS link
11/4/2020 12:28:15 am


Hi,
Thank you for the article.
Two questions: Is the answer related to MFA [Devices cannot use MFA] this still the same in 2020. Or is there any change recently. Please clarify. Is there any announcemnet from Microsoft about any change in its plan for devices and MFA

2nd Question:
SfB On-Premises + Exchange Online Mailboxes any options for the Phones to connect to the Exchange Online (using Web Proxy).
We dont want the Phones to connect Directly to the Internet and fetch the Calendar information in the Exchange Online. We want all the phones to be connected via a Web Proxy. Is this possible for SfB Phones or please share any other suggestions.

David M. Royer link
2/16/2021 02:22:24 am

Author, yet another fantastic value based article based on research, and I think all the tips of provisioning meeting room devices are the result of learning through experience, that's why they are so much valuable for the readers.

Reply

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