Set up Microsoft Exchange and Outlook 365 (on-premises solutions) to work with Gong using automatic invites

This article is for technical administrators in organizations using Microsoft Exchange or Outlook 365 who cannot give Gong API access to their employee calendars.

In most cases, Gong can connect to Microsoft Exchange or Outlook 365 via an API (provisioned using OAuth), and import calendar meetings. Gong then joins and records the corresponding web conference calls when they take place.

There are 2 reasons why this connection isn't possible:

Your on-premises Exchange server doesn’t support public API access via Office 365 APIs
There are technical limitations, such as security reasons, around API access to team members’ calendars

Automatic invites

Gong can record teleconference calls when invited to the meeting. Gong receives meeting invites and schedules recording.

You can set this invitation to be automatically sent to Gong when your employees organize a meeting. Gong receives the meeting invitation by “push” rather than by the API call “pulling” it.

Limitations

Setting up automatic invites gives the same benefits as the OAuth-based API access method, with the following limitations:

Gong records calendar web conference meetings, but cannot capture email communication from or to your customers.
Gong cannot access the existing calendar meetings of newly added team members or of team members whose settings are changed to “record”.

Gong can only record meetings that are created or updated in some way after the new team member is added to the team.
If Gong does not receive an invitation to a meeting due to some temporary issue, Gong cannot join or record the meetings.

Set up automatic invites in Exchange or Office 365

Prerequisites

You must be an Exchange admin to define the automatic invite rules.
To send invites for selected teams only (e.g. Sales team), your organization needs to have one or more Exchange groups that include the relevant team members. Most organizations have such groups set up already - if not, you'll need to set one up.

If you are piloting Gong with a small team, you can set up an ad-hoc group for that team (e.g., Gong Recorded Users).
You must be a recorded team member in Gong to test the automatic invite works.

Setup

As an Exchange administrator, log in to the Exchange admin center.
- If you’re using Office 365, it is located here:
  
  https://outlook.office365.com/ecp
Select mail flow:
Create a new rule and give it a name (e.g. Send Sales meeting invites to Gong):
Set the rule conditions to determine which meeting invites are forwarded to Gong:
1. Select More at the bottom of the page to allow multiple conditions.
2. Add a condition where "the recipient…" "is external/internal" and then select Outside the organization.
3. Add a condition where "the sender… " "is a member of this group…".
4. Type the group email address for your team at the bottom of the page, and select Check names.
  
  You can add more than one group.
  
  Note
  
  You can select a group even if some of its members are not recorded; Gong ignores invites coming from people that are not set up to be recorded.
5. Add a condition where :message properties… " "include the message type " and select Calendaring.
Your conditions should look similar to the following:
Add an action that invites Gong to the meeting.
1. Select an action Add recipients… and to the Bcc box.
2. Type or paste your company's handler address and select Check names. If you're not sure of your unique handler address, contact your CSM.
(Optional) Even though Gong always ignores invites to meetings marked as private (to let team members easily skip recording) for an extra layer of self-assurance Gong also lets you restrict the invites so they don’t apply to private meetings. Team members can also cancel recording via the Gong web application ahead of the meeting or during the call.

To skip automatic invites for such meetings:
1. Select Add exception.
2. Select A message header... and includes any of these words.
3. Select the header (Enter text…) Sensitivity and the value (Enter words…) private.
Add other exceptions, as desired.

Gong gracefully ignores invites when team members are not set up to record, therefore you don't need this rule to match the number of recorded team members exactly. However, you can add exclusion rules to narrow down the invites and exclude certain subgroups if you want.
Save the rule.

Test the automatic invitation

After an Exchange administrator has set up the rule, as a team member set to be recorded in Gong, follow these steps to confirm the setup works.

In your calendar, create a meeting invite for the near future (e.g., in an hour).
Invite someone with an external address (e.g., a Gmail user), so the rule should be triggered.
Add a conferencing URL (e.g., Zoom) to the meeting description, so that Gong knows it should process the meeting.

A sample invite should look like this:
Send the meeting invitation.
Go to the Gong homepage, and click VIEW UPCOMING CALLS.
Ensure that the call appears in the list.

Note

The call may take a couple of minutes to appear after you created the calendar event.

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