How Outlook’s Room Finder Uses Metadata from the Places Service

Metadata About Locations

In an August 2019 article, I described the Outlook Places service and its role in surfacing information about locations in OWA’s calendar. Places use room mailboxes as the basic source of information about locations, and administrators can update metadata for each room mailbox to add geocoordinates and other information about room equipment to make what’s shown to end users more comprehensive and useful. For instance, if your organization equips conference rooms with Teams meeting devices, you can add that information to the room metadata.

At the time, I suggested that tenants should update room metadata because it was obvious that Microsoft would make more use of this information over time. Well, the pandemic intervened, and conference rooms haven’t had much use over the last year and a half, so that advice wasn’t as valuable as intended. And then Microsoft updated Outlook desktop to use the OWA room finder, which introduces the places information to desktop users for the first time.

Outlook and OWA’s Room Finder

Using OWA components in Outlook desktop is part of Microsoft’s One Outlook strategy to speed up the delivery of new functionality to end users by using common components across clients. Outlook desktop consumes OWA components using the Edge WebView2 Runtime. Sometimes this has unintended consequences, such as when credentials aren’t synchronized for Outlook and OWA and the Room Finder prompts for a sign-in unexpectedly (Figure 1). After you authenticate, the Room Finder pane attempts to display the full OWA client, which isn’t the best experience.

A comment posted to the article said that after Outlook picked up OWA’s room finder, “some meeting rooms are not displaying at all, despite being available.” This deserved some investigation about how the room finder decides which rooms to display when someone uses it to find a place to meet. As it happens, Microsoft documents how to configure the Room Finder, but it’s worth underlining some of the major points about how the Room Finder works.

Room Mailboxes and Workspaces

Room mailboxes (and optionally, workspaces) are schedulable locations for meetings. Room mailboxes represent conference rooms while workspaces, a variation of room mailboxes, represent other spaces where work gets done, anything from individual desks to areas used for presentations to small individual rooms used by people when they need some privacy. You can create a regular room mailbox through the Resources section of the Exchange admin center (EAC). The information collected there (Figure 2) allows the room mailbox to show up in the GAL and be scheduled as a meeting location.

However, the EAC doesn’t support the creation of a workspace. To set up a workspace, create a regular room mailbox and then use the Set-Mailbox cmdlet to set its type to workspace:

The EAC lists all room mailboxes (including those marked as workspaces) and you can manage the calendaring settings for the rooms there. You don’t need to assign licenses to room mailboxes.

Room Lists

Room lists are distribution lists for rooms and workspaces. Only room mailboxes can be members of distribution lists used for room lists. You can’t create a room list through the EAC, but you can create a regular distribution list and then update its properties to make it a room list (if the membership doesn’t contain anything but room mailboxes):

You can’t manage room lists in the EAC and must use PowerShell to populate its membership with room mailboxes:

To see the set of available room lists, use this command:

Places Metadata

The basic calendaring settings for room mailboxes govern how people can scheduled them for meetings. The Room Finder depends on additional metadata to make good suggestions. The metadata includes the room equipment and its precise location (geo-coordinates). A separate arrangement to store and manage location metadata is needed because the mailbox properties don’t include this information. Microsoft could have expanded the property set, but this would affect all mailboxes rather than just room mailboxes. Almost 300 properties already exist for mailboxes, which is why the Get-ExoMailbox restricts the properties it returns to the bare minimum.

I cover how to use the Set-Place cmdlet to populate the location metadata in my original article. To help Room Finder make good suggestions, it’s important that every location includes information about its city, building, and floor.

Workplaces support floor plans to help people find somewhere they’ve booked. Floor plans are available in Outlook calendar and can be found in Microsoft Search by Bing. This is because floor plans and the locations the plans belong to are configured through the Microsoft Search section of the Microsoft 365 admin center. While useful, floor plans are an optional extra and don’t affect how the Room Finder works.

Updates to rooms, room lists, and room metadata can take up to 24 hours before the Conference Room assistant (a background process) runs to update the data used by Room Finder. You can’t affect when the assistant runs and be patient for changes to show up for users.

Room Finder Suggestions

To make suggestions, Room Finder checks for the last building selected by the user (on the basis that they probably want to reserve rooms in the same building). If the user never selected a building, Room Finder shows the first 20 rooms it finds in the tenant (Figure 3). These rooms are not specific to a location. Workspaces are not included in the list.

The user can apply a filter to create a more refined list. The most important choice is the building. When they select a building, the selection is for a room list. To help, Room Finder shows cities in a drop-down list. Room Finder creates the list of cities from the City property for locations updated by Set-Place. Selecting a city reveals room lists with rooms in the selected city and selecting a room list reveals the individual rooms (Figure 4).

The Type field allows users to choose between the conference rooms and workspaces in a room list. Room Finder only shows the Type field when workspaces are available.

When it lists rooms, Room Finder shows details for each room including its availability and features. Room features are indicated using icons (Figure 5), including:

• Audio.
• Video conferencing.
• Display screen.
• Wheelchair accessibility.

Room Mailbox Features

Users can search for a conference room by applying a filter to identify rooms with certain features (Figure 6). The last two features listed are custom tags created for rooms using the Set-Place cmdlet. While the examples I’ve used describe the view from a room, more productive uses would be to indicate if a room needs a special badge for access, can host a Teams online meeting, or can be catered for meals.

Room features can be updated through EAC through the Additional information section of the mailbox’s properties (Figure 7).

Here’s what the data looks like when viewed through PowerShell:

Workspaces don’t support features, possibly because many workspaces are small and not equipped in the same way as conference rooms often are.

Workspace booking is supported by Outlook mobile clients. However, when you create a “normal” event with Outlook mobile, it uses Bing maps for its location rather than Outlook places.

Deprecated Equipment and Configurations

Exchange on-premises servers don’t use Outlook places. Instead, they are limited to room and equipment mailboxes. Equipment mailboxes represent items which might belong to conference rooms (like VCRs, when we used VCRs) or can be moveable. Equipment mailboxes still exist in Exchange Online, but the information which can be defined for a location now makes them less useful than in the past. However, if your organization has equipment mailboxes, there’s no reason not to use them by scheduling them for meetings.

What is deprecated are the old resource configuration cmdlets (Set-ResourceConfig and Get-ResourceConfig) to define custom properties for room and equipment mailboxes. Outlook places ignoIt’sres this configuration data.

Important to Configure Your Places

The Room Finder can’t work properly if location data is missing or inaccurate for room mailboxes (including the location metadata) or room lists aren’t in place. Once configured, room mailboxes make the Room Finder much more useful. And the best thing is that room mailboxes are low maintenance. They should not take much management unless their equipment changes, so an update might be needed every couple of years or so.