Did you hear of room lists? What is a room list?
A room list is a collection of room mailboxes. Room lists are specially marked distribution groups that you can also use the same way you use ‘regular’ distribution groups. You can only create room lists using the Exchange Management Shell. This article goes over how to create a room list in Exchange. We highly recommend defining room lists to mirror your building layouts, so that the room finder works best.
We wanted to talk about this because we have now released the new room finder experience to Exchange Online Outlook on the web (and you should start seeing it roll out to other Outlook clients over the next few months).
Note: If room lists are not set up, the room finder will not be very useful.
Setting up the city property
If you want to have room list appear under specific cities, you must set the city property for rooms by using Set-Place cmdlet (use the -City property) or places API in Microsoft Graph.
Setting up this properly allows you to see cities under Room Finder, like the following:
1. List of recent room lists that user used or rooms that user booked that belong to those room list.
2. List of all cities where room list (buildings) are located.
Setting up filters
Filters for rooms are also set by using Set-Place cmdlet or places API. Some examples:
1. Capacity of a room (use the -Capacity property)
2. Floor on which the room is located (-Floor property)
3. Define other features a room may have:
- Several properties that can be used to define the type of a device present in the room: -AudioDeviceName, -DisplayDeviceName and -VideoDeviceName
- The -IsWheelChairAccessible parameter specifies whether the room is wheelchair accessible
Coming soon: to add more filters, the ‘tag’ property can also be set per room mailbox using Set-Place cmdlet (-Tags property) or places API. The room finder will display the unique tag string value for each room (see the “Bean bags” tag in the above screenshot, as an example.)
Room list FAQ
How can I see a list of all room lists without having to filter by city first or select recent room list?
This functionality is not available today but you can still search for the room list. The Outlook team has acknowledged there is a request to see all room list at once and will consider this request.
Why can’t I see all the cities that my company has a presence in?
There are 2 reasons why this may happen:
- The city property for a room has not been set or
- We are working through a bug that causes only a subset of cities to appear for some of our customers; if you have this problem, in a few weeks it will be history
Why is my room list (building) under the wrong city?
This is most likely due to an incorrect city value set for the room. Please review what the city value is for rooms and confirm it is correct.
I see the room finder in Outlook on the web; will the same show up in Outlook for Windows and Mac?
Yes. We are working on releasing this to other Outlook clients.
Do my room mailboxes need to be in Exchange Online for this room finder feature to work?
Yes.