Utilizing Resource Mappings vs Location Mappings
Depending on your district process and how Microsoft O365 Calendar is configured, they may not utilize the “room finder” feature of Microsoft O365 Calendar for reserving district facilities.
If this is the case, they will need to use the Location Mappings tab to map location values contained in any synced events to Locations and Rooms in iiQ.
Districts utilizing the “Room Finder” or “Places” feature in Microsoft O365 to manage the availability of facilities would likely prefer to map these to Locations/Rooms in iiQ, as:
Buildings & Rooms are more commonly used for internal reservations of facilities by end users throughout the district
Not all staff would be using iiQ to book meetings; Microsoft O365 is already widely adopted by district staff
Rooms are easier to add than free-form locations and are cleaner to map in iiQ
They would need to maintain parity of room availability in Gogle Calendar and iiQ if they have enabled write-back functionality for the Microsoft O365 integration.
While there are benefits of using resource mappings instead of location mappings, most districts will need to use both options to account for events that do not use a Microsoft O365 resource. In the scenario that an event contains both a resource and a free-form text value, the resource mapping will be utilized instead of the location mapping if they do not match.
---
Hannah Bailey - Director, Customer Engagement