How to Configure Microsoft 365 Workspace Resource Mailboxes

Hybrid Workspace Booking in Microsoft 365

Discover best practices for booking workspaces in Microsoft 365

Giving staff the ability to create a meeting in their calendars and invite a meeting room or piece of equipment as part of the same booking process has been an important feature within Microsoft Outlook Calendar for many years.

Up until recently, this was achieved using ‘resource mailboxes’, of which there were two types, room mailboxes and equipment mailboxes.

Microsoft has now introduced a third type of resource mailbox designed to support the new types of shared workspaces that organisations are using: the workspace mailbox.

In this eBook, we look at how to configure workspace resources in Microsoft 365, some of the ‘gotchas’ you need to watch out for, and the outcomes you can expect for end users of the system.

What is a workspace mailbox? 

Workspace mailboxes in Microsoft 365 are designed to be bookable space types that have an overall capacity associated with them.  Unlike meeting rooms which can only be booked by one person for a specific time, workspace resources can be booked by multiple different people for different time-frames up to a defined capacity.

A workspace could be a collaboration space, a laptop ‘touchdown’ zone,  a quiet working area – even a car park – basically any space for which you wish ‘cap’ the number of people that can use it at any one time.

For example, a workspace mailbox associated with, say, a casual seating area with a capacity of 20, could accept bookings throughout the day for many more than 20 people, as long as the total number of people booked for the space does not exceed 20 at any point in time.