Remove-CalendarEvents: Cancel future meetings in user or resource mailboxes in Office 365

When an employee leaves an organization or decides to take a long vacation, most of the time they tend to forget (or not bother) to cancel any meetings they may have organized. This blocks out otherwise available time in the Resource Mailbox, Meeting Rooms and other Attendee Calendars etc. 

In such situations a support ticket is inevitably raised with the messaging support team, who must then send out cancellation notices from the organizer calendar or manually remove those meetings from the Resource Mailbox, which causes a lot of manual work.

Here's some good news for Office365 admins. Microsoft has just introduced a New PowerShell command line Remove-CalendarEvents

This new command addition gives admins an effective means of cancelling any future meetings in User or Resource Mailboxes in Office 365, substantially cutting down on the amount of manual work required.  Canceling future meetings removes them from Attendee and Resource Calendars.

So, let's look at a few examples of using this new time saving command line.

Example 1:

The following example cancels every meeting that occurs after today's Date in the mailbox of sunil.chauhan@xyz.com

Remove-CalendarEvents -Identity sunil.chauhan@xyz.com -CancelOrganizedMeetings

Example 2:

This example cancels the meetings in Sunil Chauhan's calendar for the specified date range.

Assume Sunil has decided to take a temporary leave of absence. Canceling meetings previously organized removes them from the user and resource calendars during the period that he'll be away.

Remove-CalendarEvents -Identity "Sunil Chauhan" -CancelOrganizedMeetings -QueryStartDate 9-1-2017 -QueryWindowInDays 30

We can also preview any meetings that would be canceled from the user calendar using the example below. 

Example 3:

This example previews the meetings that would be canceled in Sachin's calendar for the specified date range. No changes are made to the mailbox.

Remove-CalendarEvents -Identity "sachin" -CancelOrganizedMeetings -QueryStartDate 9-1-2018 -QueryWindowInDays 60 -PreviewOnly -Verbose

Note: The command doesn't cancel appointments or meetings without attendees or resources.

In this post we explored how we can now cancel meetings in the organizer's Calendar with ease, by utilizing the recently introduced "Remove-CalendarEvents" PowerShell command. 

Microsoft Reference Document Link: Remove-CalendarEvents

I hope this post was informative, please feel free to leave your feedback in the comment section.