EWS - Appointment.Subject returns Organizer and not the Subject entered and displayed in Outlook

Question

I am writing a ASP.NET MVC 5 application, .NET 4.5. The page is displaying Appointments from an Exchange Server. That works nicely so far.

The problem: I just created a new meeting in Outlook 2013. Subject: Roomplan Showcase, I am "John Doe" (Organizer) and added Richard Miles to the meeting. The next time the page refreshes, the page displays: Title: John Doe; Attendants: John Doe, Richard Miles

What it should display: Title: Roomplan Showcase; Attendants: John Doe, Richard Miles

I debugged through the creation of this item and realized that indeed the Subject-Member of the appointment contains the Organizer string. The real subject is nowhere. I then checked in Outlook if I messed up the creation of the meeting, but in Outlook, OWA or other Calendars the Subject is correctly displayed. On top of this confusing behavior any other meeting (on different rooms, created prior to this test meeting) displays the correct Subject. So if I create meetings for my testroom, the subject gets messed up, but the real rooms, where real people create real meetings, the subject is pulled correctly from EWS.

Is there some configuration I can do on the Exchange? What is causing this problem?

Answer 1

On Room Mailboxes where you have configured Automatic processing the default behaviour is to replace the Subject with the Organizer name (this is security feature as the Subject of a Meeting may contain sensitive information eg meeting to dicuss redundancies etc).

You can control this behaviour using the Set-CalendarProcessing cmdlet https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335046(v=exchg.150).aspx eg "the DeleteSubject parameter specifies whether to remove or keep the subject of incoming meeting requests. Valid input for this parameter is $true or $false. The default value is $true.This parameter is used only on resource mailboxes where the AutomateProcessing parameter is set to AutoAccept."

Cheers Glen