Here is how to use Microsoft Exchange and PowerPoint as a meeting room booking system.

You see those tablet devices hanging next to the door of a meeting rooms in offices. This discretely display meeting information and you can see who is having a meeting and when your meeting is starting.

These presentations can perfectly be created with a PowerPoint information and it can get the content in real-time from a calendar service like e.g. the calendar that you are already using in Microsoft Exchange.

All you need is a tablet or computer screen, Microsoft PowerPoint and our DataPoint add-on. Read how you can create your own full-controlled meeting room display software with real-time updates from your calendar.

Design in PowerPoint, Data in Exchange

We start with this prototype meeting room presentation that we want to use to show the information. Your company logo, of course the current time, the current meeting and next meeting information. Then is very easy to create since you just have to place some pictures and text boxes on your PowerPoint slide.

Use DataPoint to link your text boxes to your Microsoft Exchange calendar. Click the DataPoint to open its options.

Click the List button of the Connections group. Navigate to the Microsoft Exchange data provider and click the Add connection button.

Enter your Microsoft Exchange connection information. We use here https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx for our hosted Exchange. Otherwise you would enter the server or domain name of the Exchange instance running in your company.

After that, click the Add query button at the connections overview, to indicate what information to read from the Microsoft Exchange server. Select one of the available data objects, or for more experienced database users, enter your custom SQL statement to filter out the information that you need.

Also verify and set your data refresh rate for real-time updates during your slide show. For a meeting room booking system, it makes perfectly sense to requery or poll the data every minute.

Click the Advanced button and click the Sort tab. For a chronological list, we need to sort the data based on the Start column, that holds the start date and time of our appointments.

At the Selection tab, check the option to filter data. As filter text use End >= Now() to remove old appointments from our data list.

Double-click OK button to close all the forms. Back on the connections form, you see a preview of your selected data. Here in our case, the calendar appointments of our mailbox. 

Select the text box that will host the name of our first meeting. Click DataPoint and then the Text box button. Set the connection to our Exchange query. From the list of columns, choose to Subject column and set the row number to 1. You see a preview of the value here already.

Click OK to confirm the text box linking. After that, whatever value you will have at the first meeting of your calendar, will always be displayed here in this text box. Use your Microsoft Outlook client or the calendar function of your smartphone to maintain the information.

Do some similar linking on other text boxes for the start and end time, as well as the name of the next meeting.

Run the slide show and DataPoint will continuously check for updates on your Microsoft Exchange calendar and update the information on your slide when needed.

Meeting Room Booking System Using PowerPoint and Exchange

This is a perfect demonstration of what you can do with Microsoft PowerPoint and our DataPoint add-on. It gives you full flexibility to design your own meeting room booking system display screens, with the presentation software tool that you already have and know how to operate.

What else would you need?