Best way to keep office room calendar bookings in sync between Google and M365 tenants

Does your organization share conference rooms with another company, only to struggle with keeping calendars in sync? The challenge becomes even more complex when each company uses a different office collaboration suite — Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. In this blog post, we’ll introduce a seamless solution: a simple and near real-time two-way synchronization between room calendars. With this approach, you can eliminate double bookings and scheduling conflicts, ensuring a smooth and efficient shared workspace experience for the best productivity of all companies.

What is SyncPenguin?

SyncPenguin is a powerful cloud solution designed with one goal in mind: providing a simple and efficient way to sync data between third-party services. Whether you need to synchronize calendars, contacts, tasks, or other essential data, SyncPenguin seamlessly connects a wide range of cloud platforms. With flexible customization options, you can easily tailor the syncing process to meet your specific needs, ensuring a smooth and hassle-free data integration experience.

All synchronizations are created and managed from the dashboard: https://dashboard.syncpenguin.com/. Feel free to create a free trial account any time.

How to create a sync between Google and M365 rooms?

Such a sync can be created in the dashboard. Sign in and head to the “Synchronizations” section of the dashboard. Select Outlook Calendar Meetings as the first synced app, and Google Calendar Meetings as the second. Then, select the syncing direction and click the “Create sync” button.

Once the sync is created, you’ll see the main sync page.

How to connect Google room or resource calendar?

To connect a Google room calendar, click the “Edit” button next to the Google Calendar Meetings section of “Sync profile”. Then, click the “CONNECT” button and connect a user account that has full access to the room calendar. Once connected, in the “Calendar” field, select the room calendar to sync. If the room calendar is not added to the user calendar list in Google Calendar, you can enter the room resource email directly into the field and click Enter (see the example below).

If the room is correctly connected, you’ll see the green “Connected” label. If you see “Issues found” instead, please make sure the room resource email is correct and that the connected user has full access.

Not sure how to get room resource email? Go to your Google Workspace admin console, then go to Directory → Buildings and resources → Manage resources → Resources → select the room, and you’ll see the resource email.

How to connect M365 meeting room or resource calendar?

Microsoft 365 room calendar can be connected in a similar way. In the Outlook Calendar Meetings section, click “Edit”, then “CONNECT” and connect an account that has full access to the room. Once connected, select the room calendar in the “Calendar” field as shown below.

If you don’t see the room calendar in the dropdown, you need to add it in the Outlook app (web or desktop) of the connected user. If it’s added but you don’t see the calendar in the dropdown, please try removing the calendar in Outlook and adding it back in.

As with Google, if the account and room is correctly connected, you’ll see the green “Connected” label.

If you have any issues with connecting rooms, feel free to contact us for help.

How to start syncing?

Once the rooms are connected, the last step is to start the automatic syncing. To do that, find the “Actions” section and click “Start syncing”. Then, in the popup window select “Merge all existing meetings two-way” and click “Merge and start”. This will start the initial sync process, after which any changes to your calendars will be automatically synced in real time.

In the “Sync history” section of the dashboard you can see all syncing events that occur during the initial sync, as well as all automatic synchronizations occurring after that.

Summary

We hope that you found this article useful and we were able to help you or your organization with keeping your conference room calendars in sync.

If you have any questions, or want to consult with our expert regarding syncing use case that you have, feel free to contact us any time.