HqO Visitor Management - Outlook Visitor Invitations

Connect Outlook once for your organization, then create a visitor whenever you need one by adding a dedicated invite account to your meeting — no per-person mailbox setup required.

How it works

The Outlook Visitor Invitations integration lets you turn an ordinary Outlook meeting into a visitor record. Rather than watching every external meeting on a connected mailbox, HqO listens for a single, dedicated invite account (for example, building-name@yourcompany.com). When someone adds that account as an attendee on a meeting, HqO automatically creates a visit for each external guest on the invite.

This means you decide, meeting by meeting, when a visit should be created — simply by choosing whether to add the invite account.

Only external guests become visitors. Attendees from your own organization are ignored, and the invite account itself never gets a visit.

Setting up the integration

Setup is a one-time task, usually done by an admin or IT. The connection applies across all of your buildings.

In HqO Admin, go to Visitor Management and open the Outlook connection.
Click Connect Outlook and complete the Microsoft consent prompt. This connects your organization's Outlook workspace — individual users do not need to connect their own mailboxes.
Choose the dedicated invite account — the email address people will add to a meeting when they want to create visitors (for example, building-name@yourcompany.com).
Assign the invite account to the correct building. HqO uses this mapping to decide which building each visit is created in.

Once setup is complete, the invite account is ready to use on any meeting.

Inviting a visitor

To create visitors from a meeting, add the dedicated invite account as an attendee:

In Outlook, create or open a meeting.
Add your external guest(s) as attendees, just as you normally would.
Add the dedicated invite account (for example, building-name@yourcompany.com) as an attendee.
Send the invite.

HqO creates a visit for each external attendee, scoped to the building mapped to that invite account. The meeting organizer becomes the visit host, so arrival notifications go to the right person. If the organizer isn't an HqO user, notifications go to a configured building contact.

Visitor details

In most cases, Outlook only provides a guest's email address — not their name. HqO fills in visitor records as follows:

Situation	First name	Last name
Guest already has a visitor profile	Existing first name	Existing last name
New guest, email only	Guest's email address	`External Visitor` (default, editable)

The full email address is always retained as the visitor's searchable identifier, so you can find the record even before the name is corrected. Once you edit a guest's name, HqO reuses it the next time that email appears.

Last name is never left blank. Some access control systems (such as Lenel) reject a visitor with no last name, which would cause the visit to fail — so HqO always applies a non-empty default (External Visitor) that you can edit.

You can edit any visitor's details from the visit record in Visitor Management.

Updates and cancellations

HqO keeps visits in sync with the meeting:

Meeting updated — the visit is updated to match.
Meeting cancelled — the related visits are cancelled.
Invite account removed from the meeting — the related visits are cancelled.
An external attendee removed from the meeting — that guest's visit is cancelled.

Permissions and security

The integration connects to your Microsoft 365 / Outlook environment using read-only Microsoft Graph permissions. HqO does not send email on your behalf, does not read message content, and does not create or modify users, calendars, or any other data in your tenant.

HqO needs access to two things:

What HqO accesses	Why it's needed	Access level
User profiles (directory)	Confirm an attendee's profile exists and is valid, and distinguish internal from external guests	Read only
Calendar events	Receive a notification when the invite account is added to a meeting, and read that event's attendee list	Read only

These correspond to the following Microsoft Graph application permissions:

User.Read.All — read user profiles across the directory.
Calendars.Read — read calendar events and their attendees.

HqO does not request any write, send, or user-management permissions. Access is granted once via a tenant-wide admin consent; individual users are never prompted to sign in or grant access.What's not supported

Internal-to-internal visits — inviting a colleague from your own organization to visit another office is not covered by this integration; internal attendees are always skipped.
Selecting individual attendees — every external guest on a meeting with the invite account becomes a visitor. There is not yet an option to choose only some guests or to include an internal guest.

Need help?

If visits aren't being created as expected, confirm the invite account was added as an attendee, the guest is external to your organization, and the account is mapped to a building. Still stuck? Contact HqO Support.