A simple room availability display for Microsoft 365 — without visitor check-in or resource management

Written by Puresoft Ltd, maker of Meet Me At Work. Our product appears once, in a marked section. Sources checked 22 August 2026.

In 2022 someone asked exactly this on Spiceworks: "I need a simple solution that integrates with Office 365 Room and Equipment resources to show the Conference room calendar or availability on a small display outside the room… I do not need multiple features or functions like visitor check-in or resource management." Six replies, 1,323 views — a lot of people searching, thin answers. The reply marked accepted was an enterprise scheduling panel; the one "cheap and easy" claim (tablets with a green/red light holder) never answered the follow-up asking what hardware and software it actually was. The asker's constraint — simple, no suite — was never really honoured. Let's honour it.

The minimal options, cheapest honest total first

A QR code on the door (no display). Total cost: a printout. The "display" is the phone of whoever's at the door; scanning shows the room's live day calendar. This drops exactly one capability — seeing the status without taking your phone out — and drops every install cost with it. Details in the marked section below, since this is the shape our product sells.
A tablet in kiosk mode on the room calendar's day view. Total cost: tablet + enclosure + power at the door + upkeep. Works with a plain Microsoft 365 room mailbox. Watch for web sessions timing out (one build restarted the browser on a schedule to survive it) and batteries on 24/7 charge.
A kiosk PC or all-in-one showing the room mailbox calendar. The 2017-era answer. It works, but one asker discovered the room account needed a full user licence assigned and sign-in enabled just to render its own calendar on a wall — a recurring per-door cost for a static display.
A certified scheduling panel. The polished answer and the expensive one: hardware per door, PoE, and a per-device licence. If "simple" meant "simple to run" rather than "simple to buy", this is that — but it is emphatically not the no-suite budget option the question asked for.

The part nobody says out loud

"Simple availability display" is usually a proxy for two different wishes: stop people barging into occupied rooms, and let people at the door grab a free room. A read-only display serves the first wish only. The second needs something bookable at the door — which is why several threads end with the asker realising a display alone doesn't close the loop, and why the products sold as "displays" all grew booking buttons. Decide which wish you're buying for before pricing anything.

Where our product fits

Meet Me At Work is the first option productised, plus the booking loop: a permanent QR code per room; scanning opens the live calendar and books the room (work-email magic link once per device, no passwords, no app). It is deliberately not a workplace suite — no visitor check-in, no floor plans, no resource management — which is precisely what the 2022 asker wanted to avoid paying for. First room free for life. And it lives happily inside Microsoft 365: with the Outlook add-in and Teams tab rolled out, a meeting composed in Outlook or Teams is an ordinary Exchange meeting with live room availability in the compose window — the room books itself when the invite is sent and is released when the meeting is cancelled — while bookings made at the door mirror back into the organiser's Outlook or Google calendar. The one habit to retire is inviting a legacy room resource mailbox directly: the room's calendar becomes the booking system's rather than a mailbox's.