How to install Exchange Integration for on-premise

This guide is for the IT administrator and explains how to setup Pronestor Planner with coexistence.

Coexistance can either be on-premise or in the cloud hosted by Pronestor. For cloud, Pronestor handles the installation parts of the guide, but on-premise customers have to install this themselves on their server.

Table of contents

• What does coexistence do?
• Requirements
• Service account
• On-premise only - installing the modules
  • Configuring the Syncronization Module
  • Installing the Syncronization Module
  • Installing the Coexistence Module
• Connecting the service account with Pronestor Planner

What does coexistence do?

With coexistence Pronestor Planner and MS Exchange are synchronized and room resources are shared. You keep all resources on your Exchange server and create the same resources in Pronestor Planner. All bookings of meeting rooms done in Outlook/MS Exchange will be reflected in Pronestor Planner and vice versa.

Some features of Pronestor are disabled in the coexistence solution.

What is the purpose of the sync module, which is mandatory for coexistence

The syncronization module reads updates in exchange and updates Pronestor Planner to match what is in exchange. It's a oneway communication from outlook/exchange to Pronestor, due to technical limitations by Microsoft.

The syncronization module allows you to update your Pronestor meetings in situations where you can access Exchange but not the Pronestor plugin. This could be a mobile app or webmail for instance.

What happens if the sync module is activated for an existing running customer

Email will be send to users – if the sync module discover an out-of-sync issue with an Outlook appointment and a Pronestor meeting.

So it worst case – if multiple out-of-sync issues are discovered – then multiple emails will be send to the user.

The sync must be  completed before enable room for coexistence.

Requirements

• Administrator and facility manager rights in your Pronestor Planner solution.
• A service account with application impersonation rights in exchange. We recommend it is set to password never expires.
• All Pronestor users have to be created with their primary exchange smtp as their email. The easy way to do this is to import users.
• Exchange Web Services must be reachable from Pronestor.
• We can only connect towards one exchange environment, so all the users, calendars, meeting rooms and the service account has to be in the same exchange environment.
• All calendars, meeting rooms, and users must have their primary smtp set to the original and not an alias.
• Exchange has to be setup with specific settings. See the attached Exchange_Settings.txt attached to the buttom of this guide for details.
• AutoDiscover on Exchange must be reachable from Pronestor - here are some guides on setting it up:
  In general regarding AutoDiscover:
  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj900169(v=exchg.150).aspx
  How to test/validate:
  https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/rmilne/archive/2014/10/02/how-to-check-exchange-autodiscover-srv-record-using-nslookup.aspx
• Server must have the feature "Message Queuing Server" enabled

Service Account

• Exchange service account with application impersonation permissions on users including other settings.
  Please see this guide on how to set it up https://helpdesk.pronestor.com/hc/en-us/articles/203580165-Settings-permissions-for-Exchange
• Exchange service account must have a mailbox and the primary email address for that account must be the original one and not an alias
• The Exchange service account must be dedicated to the Pronestor solution and not a shared service account for other services as well

On-premise only - installing the modules

The coexistence module needs the Syncronization Module installed. Both modules will be covered in this guide. The modules have to be installed on the same web server as the Pronestor web site.

Configuring the Syncronization Module

Pronestor Planner has to be configured to be aware that synchronization is enabled.

• Download the ExchangeBookingSyncService.zip from https://downloads.pronestor.com/
• Unzip in c:\program files\pronestor aps\sync
• With Notepad open "ExchangeBookingSyncService.exe.config"
• Set the dbConnectionString
• Set dryRun to "true" for testing, or set to "false" for alive sync
• Save and Exit

You can start by running the Syncronization Module in a console to ensure that the module has been properly configured before installing it as a Service.

Installing the Syncronization Module

• Open a command prompt
• Navigate to the "Sync" folder
• Type "ExchangeBookingSyncService.exe install" (if installing multiple service instances, use -i [optionalservicename] to name the specific instance name - ex. ExchangeBookingSyncService install -instance:SyncServiceXYZ)
• Once installed - open "Services.msc"
• Open the "ExchangeBookingSyncService"
• Set "Log on"-tab, use an account with local administrative permissions
• Go to "General"
• click "Start"

For any issues - please check log.txt or check event viewer

Installing the coexistence module

Pronestor Planner has to be configured to be aware that coexistence is enabled.

• Open "appSettings.config" within the configuation folder of Pronestor
• Ensure that the key "ExchangeIntegrationMode" is set to "Coexistence".
  i.e. <add key="ExchangeIntegrationMode" value="Coexistence"/>
• Recycle the app pool

Connecting the service account with Pronestor Planner

Please see this guide https://helpdesk.pronestor.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029574451-How-to-configure-Coexistence