How to require approval only for room bookings longer than N hours

Written by Puresoft Ltd, maker of Meet Me At Work. Most of this guide is about configuring Exchange, which you already own; our product appears once, in a marked section. Sources checked 22 August 2026.

The requirement, as asked on Spiceworks in November 2024: "Booking till 3 hours is allowed, and if user requests for more than 3 hours, then it should go for an approval. Is that possible?" The first answers said no — "You can set limits, but not to be approved if the request is over that limit. At least not directly via Exchange" — and an MVP offered MaximumDurationInMinutes, which is not approval: it auto-declines anything over the cap. The correct native answer arrived last in the thread and was never marked accepted. Here it is, verified against Microsoft's documentation.

What Exchange can actually do

A room mailbox's booking attendant has a concept of in-policy and out-of-policy requests. Set the duration cap, then — the part the forums miss — allow out-of-policy requests to be submitted for approval rather than declined, and give the mailbox delegates to approve them:

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity "Boardroom" `
  -AutomateProcessing AutoAccept `
  -MaximumDurationInMinutes 180 `
  -AllBookInPolicy $true `
  -AllRequestOutOfPolicy $true `
  -ResourceDelegates "[email protected]"

The behaviour, per Microsoft's Set-CalendarProcessing reference: bookings of three hours or less auto-accept; longer requests go to the delegates — "Out-of-policy requests require approval by a resource mailbox delegate." Microsoft's booking-attendant troubleshooting page confirms the key property of this tier: an out-of-policy request "is never declined automatically." That is precisely "over N hours goes for approval". It works today, on the licences you already have.

Where the native model stops

One policy dimension set. Out-of-policy is triggered by Exchange's fixed policy checks (duration, booking window, recurrence, working hours). You cannot express "approve if the organiser is from Sales", "one booking per person per day", or "no more than three consecutive days" — the same 2024 thread asked for those and the accurate answer was "Not automatically, no."
The delegate experience is email. Approvals arrive as meeting requests in the delegates' inboxes; there is no queue view, no escalation, no audit dashboard.
All-or-nothing per user list. Whether a given user's over-limit request is declined or routed depends on the in-policy/out-of-policy permission lists, which are their own minefield.
The requester's phone isn't in the loop. Nothing warns the booker at booking time that their 4-hour request will sit in a queue — they find out when the tentative meeting resolves, or doesn't.

If you've outgrown that

Dedicated room-booking systems (ours among them) treat duration approval as a first-class rule rather than a side effect of policy tiers: per-room caps, a warning at slot-pick time so the booker can shorten the meeting instead of joining a queue, an approvals view for the admin, and the decision pushed back to the booker. If your only requirement is the 3-hour rule above, configure Exchange and stop there — it's free. If the surrounding workflow (warnings, queues, per-room rules, recurring series) is the real requirement, that's when a booking system earns its per-room fee.

Where our product fits

In Meet Me At Work, each room has a maximum staff booking length (default 2 hours, configurable per room). A booking over the limit isn't declined and isn't silently queued — the booker is warned while picking the slot, can shorten it on the spot, or submit it as a request that lands in the admin's requests view with one-click approve/decline, with the outcome emailed back. And a room that shouldn't enforce a cap at all is one selection: the same per-room control ends in a Full day option matching the room's bookable hours, with which nothing ever routes to approval. The first room is free for life if you want to try the workflow.