Create resource accounts for rooms and shared Teams devices

This article provides steps to create resource accounts for shared spaces and devices, and it includes steps to configure resource accounts for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, Teams Rooms on Android, Teams Rooms on Surface Hub, and hot-desking on Teams displays.

Microsoft 365 resource accounts are mailbox and Teams accounts that are dedicated to specific resources, such as a room or projector. These resource accounts can automatically respond to meeting invites using rules you define when they're created. For example, if you have a common resource such as a conference room, you can set up a resource account for that conference room that will automatically accept or decline meeting invites depending on its calendar availability.

Every resource account is unique to a single Microsoft Teams Rooms installation or Teams display hot-desking implementation.

Important

Microsoft 365 resource accounts aren't the same as Teams resource accounts. Teams resource accounts can be used with call queues and auto attendants to accept phone calls from external phone numbers. Microsoft 365 resource accounts are tied to an Exchange Online mailbox and enable booking of shared resources, such as rooms, projectors, and so on.

If you want to know more about Teams resource accounts, see Manage resources accounts in Microsoft Teams.

Note

If using Microsoft Teams panels, the Teams Rooms resource account signs in to both Teams Rooms and associated Teams panels.

Note

Skype for Business

If you need to enable your resource account to work with Skype for Business, see Deploy Microsoft Teams Rooms with Skype for Business Server

Depending on your environment, you need one or more roles to create resource accounts.

Important

If you're creating resource accounts for Teams Rooms, the resource account's UPN must match the SMTP address of the resource account.

In the next step you'll create a resource account for your Teams Rooms console. Before you do that, you need to purchase a license because each resource account you want to associate with a Teams Rooms console needs a Teams Rooms license.

Follow the steps below to purchase a Teams Room Basic or Teams Rooms Pro license that you can assign to a resource account in a later step. For a comparison between the Teams Rooms Basic and Teams Rooms Pro licenses, see Teams Meeting Room Licensing Update.

Note

If you have multiple Teams Rooms consoles, we recommend that you purchase a Teams Rooms Pro license for each of your consoles. The Teams Rooms Pro license enables more advanced remote management and analytics for Teams Rooms, enabling you to create a more consistent and robust Teams Rooms and meeting experience.

Note

You can purchase up to 25 Teams Rooms Basic licenses. Any additional licenses you purchase beyond 25 must be Teams Rooms Pro licenses.

You can purchase a Teams Rooms Basic license for a Teams Room console and later change the license for that console to Teams Rooms Pro. First make sure you have an available Teams Rooms Pro license and then follow the instructions in Change the apps and services a user has access to.

Each Microsoft Teams Rooms device needs its own resource account. The resource account is the account the Teams Rooms device logs into and is what users in your organization invite to book the Teams Room.

When you create the resource mailbox, you can specify whether you want to allow recurring meetings, have the room auto accept invites, how many days into the future to accept invites, and so on.

Tip

When naming your resource accounts, we recommend using a standard naming convention to the beginning of the e-mail address. This will help with creating dynamic groups to ease management in Azure Active Directory. For example, you could use "mtr-" for all resource accounts that will be associated with Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Tip

We recommend that you create all resource accounts using Exchange Online and Azure Active Directory.

Create a resource account using a method from one of the following tabs:

Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Provide the admin credentials for your Microsoft 365 tenant.

Go to Resources in the left panel, and then select Rooms & equipment. If these options aren't available in the left panel, you may need to select Show all first.

Select Add resource to create a new resource account. Enter a display name and email address for the account and then select Save.

By default, resource accounts are configured with the following settings:

If you want to change them, select Edit booking options before you select Close. If you want to change them later, go to Resources > Rooms & equipment, select the resource account. Then under Booking options, select Edit.

Go to Users > Active users, and select the room you created to open the properties panel.

Next, assign a password to the resource account. In the panel, select Reset password.

Requiring users to change the password on a shared device will cause sign in problems. Uncheck Require this user to change their password when they first sign in, and select Reset password.

You may also need to apply bandwidth policies or meeting policies to this account. You can set mailbox policies in a later step.

Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell.

By default, room mailboxes don't have associated accounts. Add an account when you create a room mailbox so it can authenticate with Microsoft Teams.

If you're creating a new resource mailbox:

This example creates a new room mailbox with the following settings:

Account: [email protected]

Name: ConferenceRoom01

Alias: ConferenceRoom01

Account password: P@$$W0rd5959

If you're in an Exchange hybrid configuration, you need to add an email address for your on-premises domain account. See Sync on-premises and Office 365 user accounts directories for more information.

Connect to Exchange Management Shell. Open the Exchange Management Shell or connect to your Exchange server using remote PowerShell.

To create a new room mailbox:

This example creates a new room mailbox with the following settings:

Account: [email protected]

Name: ConferenceRoom01

Alias: ConferenceRoom01

Account password: P@$$W0rd5959

To modify an existing room mailbox to become a resource account, use the following syntax:

This example enables the account for the existing room mailbox that has the alias value ConferenceRoom02, and sets the password to 9898P@$$W0rd.

If you're in an Exchange hybrid configuration, you'll also need to add an email address for your on-premises domain account. See Sync on-premises and Office 365 user accounts directories for more information.

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see New-Mailbox and Set-Mailbox.

Note

If you're creating this account for Teams Room on Surface Hub, you should also enable ActiveSync on this account. This will allow you to send e-mail directly from the Surface Hub, which you can use for features like Whiteboard. See Applying ActiveSync policies to device accounts (Surface Hub) to learn more.

Important

If you're only using this resource account to book space and automatically accept or decline invitations, you've completed the set up. If you're using this resource account for PSTN calling, see Microsoft Teams add-on licenses to determine what license it needs.

You can improve your Teams Rooms meeting experience by customizing how the resource account responds to, and processes, meeting invitations. Using Exchange Online PowerShell, you can set the following resource account properties:

AutomateProcessing: AutoAccept Meeting organizers receive the room reservation decision directly without human intervention.

AddOrganizerToSubject: $false The meeting organizer isn't added to the subject of the meeting request.

DeleteComments: $false Keep any text in the message body of incoming meeting requests. This is required to process external Teams and third-party meetings to provide One Touch Join experience.

DeleteSubject: $false Keep the subject of incoming meeting requests.

ProcessExternalMeetingMessages: $true Specifies whether to process meeting requests that originate outside the Exchange organization. Required for external Teams meetings and third-party meetings.

RemovePrivateProperty: $false Ensures the private flag that was sent by the meeting organizer in the original meeting request remains as specified.

AddAdditionalResponse: $true The text specified by the AdditionalResponse parameter is added to meeting requests.

AdditionalResponse: "This is a Microsoft Teams Meeting room!" The additional text to add to the meeting acceptance response.

To configure these properties, you need to connect to Exchange Online PowerShell. For more information, see Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell.

After you've connected to Exchange Online PowerShell, you can configure the mailbox properties on a resource account by using the Set-CalendarProcessing cmdlet.

The following example sets the properties for the ConferenceRoom01 resource account:

Like any Microsoft 365 account, a newly-created resource account's password is set to expire automatically after a period of time. However, if the resource account password expires, the Teams Rooms device it's signed into won't be able to sign in again the expiration date.

To avoid having to reset the resource account's password and then logging into each Teams Rooms device again, you can turn off password expiration for the account.

Note

Setting Password never expires is a requirement for shared Microsoft Teams devices. If your domain rules prohibit passwords that don't expire, you'll need to create an exception for each Teams device resource account.

Follow the steps in one of the following tabs to turn off password expiration:

First, Connect to Active Directory PowerShell:

Then, see Set a password to never expire.

This example sets the password for the account [email protected] to never expire.

Connect to MSOnline PowerShell:

For details about Active Directory, see Azure Active Directory (MSOnline).

Set the password to never expire by using the following syntax:

This example sets the password for the account [email protected] to never expire.

Connect to Active Directory PowerShell:

For details about Active Directory PowerShell, see ActiveDirectory.

Set the password to never expire by using the following syntax:

This example sets the password for the account [email protected] to never expire.

After you create the resource account, you need to assign a license to it. The resource account needs a Microsoft Teams Rooms Basic or Teams Rooms Pro license to sign into a Microsoft Teams Rooms device. For more information, see Microsoft Teams Rooms licenses.

Note

Microsoft Teams Rooms Basic and Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro are the two available SKUs for shared meeting room devices, including Teams Rooms. A meeting room license is required for Teams displays with hot-desking.

To assign licenses using the Microsoft 365 admin center, do the following:

You may need to apply custom network, bandwidth, or meeting policies to this account. For more information on network and bandwidth policies, see Meeting policy settings for audio & video. For Teams Rooms, we recommend you set the meeting policy bandwidth to 10 Mbps.

For collaboration purposes, turn on PowerPoint Live, Whiteboard, and shared notes. It is recommended that you enable the meeting policy setting "Meet now in private meetings". You may want to create a meeting policy to adjust participants and guest settings for Teams Rooms. For example, review the lobby settings such as which attendees to automatically admit to meetings. For more information on Teams meeting policies, see Manage meeting policies in Microsoft Teams.

There are no unique requirements to enable calling with resource accounts. You enable the resource account for calling in the same way you enable a regular user.

Note

We recommend turning off voice mail for shared devices by assigning a calling policy to the device resource accounts. See Calling and call-forwarding in Teams for more information.

To help your users more easily schedule meetings in a Teams Room, you can create room lists and places in Exchange Online.

Exchange room lists and Outlook Places are used to control which resource accounts (and therefore the Teams Rooms they're associated with) appear in Outlook's Room Finder. Room Finder is an Outlook feature that helps users find rooms that are near them, available for reservation, and meet other criteria such as the availability of a display.

Room lists are a special type of Exchange distribution group that let you group resource accounts (and therefore the Teams Rooms they're associated with) together in a meaningful way. For example, you might want to create room lists for all the rooms in each building on your campus.

Outlook Places lets you set specific attributes about a resource account and its Teams Room. Some of the attributes you can set are:

Using a combination of room lists and place attributes selected by a user, Room Finder in Outlook will show a list of rooms available to them for reservation. To make the best use of room lists and places, create room lists based on a place attribute, such as building. For example, set the city and building place attributes for each resource account, and then add each resource account to a building room list. When a user tries to choose a room to reserve, Outlook will show a list of cities and the room lists available in each of those cities.

Important

Each resource account needs to have its place attributes set. If these attributes, especially city, building, and capacity, aren't set, those rooms won't show up as available options for reservation even if a room list contains them.

To create a room list, follow the instructions in Create a rooms list.

To configure the place attributes for a resource account, see Set-Place.

Configure accounts for Microsoft Teams Rooms

Plan for Microsoft Teams Rooms

Deploy Microsoft Teams Rooms

Manage Microsoft Teams Rooms

Microsoft Teams Rooms Licensing