Blog Post

Exchange Team Blog

4 MIN READ

Book a workspace in Outlook

The_Exchange_Team

Microsoft

Jul 20, 2020

Update - May 11, 2021: Updated with floor plan information.

Imagine you could book an office to work anywhere in the world. Now imagine this could be done in Outlook. Well, we have built a feature to let you do that! We have built this in Outlook for Windows, Mobile, Mac and Outlook on the web users with Exchange Online mailboxes.

In the image below you can see the room finder has a new ‘type’ drop down. In the drop down you would be able to select workspace or conference room. Here’s what users can expect to see in Outlook for Windows:

The same rich capability in Outlook on the web:

And for those cool kids with a Mac, the same great experience. No matter what client your users choose, they can use this feature just the same:

If you have an Android phone go to your calendar settings and enable ‘workspace booking’:

On your iOS phone go to your calendar settings and enable ‘workspace booking’:

Outlook on mobile web experience:

NEW! You can now add floor plans to your workspaces in Outlook mobile using Microsoft search. See Manage floor plans for more information.

What is a workspace?

A workspace is a physical location where employees can work from. It can be made up of many desks or can be a single desk. The way you book a workspace is very similar to how you book a conference room in Outlook. The same policies that can apply for a conference room can also apply for a workspace.

The main difference with workspaces is that they have a capacity and a minimum booking duration requirement. Workspaces can be booked by the number of people that the capacity was set for. Capacity refers to the total capacity of the workspace. For example, if a workspace has 10 desks but has been already booked to 50% capacity, only 5 people can book that workspace for a specific time period. If the 11^th person tries to book the same workspace, it will be shown as unavailable and they will receive an automatic decline.

How do your users book a workspace?

Open the Outlook calendar and create a “new event”. A minimum duration of 3 hours is needed for workspace booking. We recommend booking a workspace as an all-day event.
Set the “Show as” status to “Free” so the invite doesn’t block your calendar.
Open the “Room finder” by selecting the location input and then “Browse with Room Finder”.
Select your building from the drop-down and “Workspace” option from the “Type” drop-down. If you don’t see a workspace option, then your building may not have workspaces (or they have not been defined yet - see below for how to do that).
Browse available workspaces. Availability is shown based on if there is at least one available space for the duration of this booking.
Save the event and then the user will get the auto-generated email confirming the booking:

Note: Additional attendees can be added to an invite and a seat will be reserved for them if available. If the number of additional attendees added to the invite exceeds the number of available seats, then the booking will be rejected.

How do you create a workspace?

Configuring a workspace is very similar to how you would configure a conference room. The key to defining a room mailbox as the workspace is setting the mailbox type.

Step 1: Create a new mailbox as a space using New-Mailbox

New-Mailbox -Room {alias} | Set-Mailbox -Type Workspace

Wait up to 24 hours before proceeding (to ensure the new mailbox is fully provisioned).

Step 2: Add required metadata using Set-Place. In hybrid environments, this cmdlet doesn't work on the following properties on synchronized room mailboxes: City, CountryOrRegion, GeoCoordinates, Phone, PostalCode, State, and Street. To modify these properties on synchronized room mailboxes, use the Set-User or Set-Mailbox cmdlets in on-premises Exchange.

Capacity
Street
City
State
Postal code
CountryOrRegion
GeoCoordinates
Floor

Step 3: Add workspace to an appropriate roomlist (distribution group) so the workspace shows up in a particular building, for example.

Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "Building 32" -Member wkspace3223@contoso.com

Step 4: Enforce capacity for workspaces based on set capacity value & Update minimum duration for booking workspace

Set-CalendarProcessing {alias} -EnforceCapacity $True -MinimumDurationInMinutes {int32}

Note: Distribution groups or lists cannot be added to the booking request. Individual people can be added, and workspace bookings will count the capacity of all attendees on the request. Please note it may take up to 24 hours for workspaces and new room list to appear in the room finder.

Summary

Workspaces in Outlook on the web and Outlook mobile (iOS & Android) is rolling out to all Office 365 commercial users in multi-tenant environments now and will be complete in a week. Outlook for Mac is available to all Insider Fast users using the new Outlook for Mac. The new room finder that offers workspace booking in Outlook for Windows is rolling out to Monthly Channel subscription customers. Semi-annual channel roll out will start in July 2021.

Note: for those customers who used CustomAttribute11 (from our initial release) please make sure to update your workspaces to use –Type Workspace.

Please, tell us what you think in the comments below, in our UserVoice channel or using the in-product smile feature.

Thank you!

Victoria Rodriguez

Updated May 11, 2021

Version 9.0

Microsoft

Joined April 19, 2019

View Profile

Exchange Team Blog

You Had Me at EHLO.

138 Comments

AnnaM2024
Copper Contributor
Sep 10, 2024
Hi, can I just check if anyone else has similar issue with workspaces - people in my organization are able to overbook the workspace as the capacity set is not counted with every booking accepted... I double, triple checked settings and the we set it up properly with

Set-CalendarProcessing -EnforceCapacity $true

Any ideas? Thanks
Deleted
Feb 01, 2024
Hi The_Exchange_Team & vrod29 , may I know if "-ProcessExternalMeetingMessages" parameter apply to workspace resource? Getting "Spaces can not be booked as attendees" error while trying to book workspace as an external user.
Jarrad_McMullen
Iron Contributor
Feb 01, 2023
PeterRauscher If you haven't already, report that to MS as a bug as that is far from ideal!
As a workaround, you could allow longer bookings and book the workspace for a week, instead of using recurring meetings.
PeterRauscher
Copper Contributor
Dec 12, 2022
Workspace overbooking

I have the problem, that workspace rooms set to capacy 6 can be booked by more than 6 persons and the room still accepts the booking requests.
For example: The room is booked by four people. So there should be still two places available. The next one booking the room gets an accept mail that tells "capacity 6, available 5, persons for this request 1, remaining 5.
The result out of that is, that at the end of the day the room with capacy 6 is booked by 7 people and still accept more bookings.

We book the room directly out of the outlook address book. Do I have to use the Roomfinder to select the Workspace, or can I just select it out of the Outlook address book or roomlist?

Solution
The problem is, that repeating meetings are not recognized as a booking. So if the capacity of the room is 6 and you book the room daily by repeating meetings, the slot will not be used. So if someone else books the room with a single booking, the room replys, that all spaces are still free.
So the solution is: Only book single full day meetings. This is really annoying, because if someone uses the room every day, he/she has to book the room five times a week, one booking each day. But then it works fine. The capacity is counted correctly and if the room is full 6/6, then it is shown as full in the roomlist.
DaveTheTeamsGuy
Iron Contributor
Oct 20, 2022
I opened a case with Unified Support re: the workspace + Teams meeting issue and was asked to file a DCR. It was accepted and I was told a fix would be put into place, but no time frame was given. I think that's good news, but it would be nice to hear from the The_Exchange_Team on these other issues.
JanVilimek
Copper Contributor
Oct 20, 2022
@
NMLVS
May 14 2021 02:10 PM
wrote:
Based on some testing here is some feedback:

- The bug mentioned about partial day bookings blocking the whole day is still current

- I found a problem where if you also send a Teams Meeting as part of your booking you get a declined, due to the error "Two or more spaces can not be booked at the same time". This is a problem as people in our organization have Teams set up to always be a there when you create an Outlook event. (as shown here: https://youtu.be/P4FG3hLfE0c)

- If you select 'Type: Workspace", and then change the building location, if flips back to 'Conference Room', a little bit annoying.

- Workspaces are set to 'Busy' by default, would be nice if this did not happen. (I know this is documented in your instructions, but I kept forgetting this in my testing, users won't remember)

- Hybrid rooms seem to work OK, you need to set some properties on-prem, and the rest online. I don't see any reason to build the rooms on prem though, as even the Cloud Only rooms show for everyone, even with our auto discover being on-prem.

- Rooms take 24 hours to show as per documented, not sure why it has to take so long.

- You get an error when running 'Set-Place' on newly created rooms 'Encountered an internal server error' (I know the documentation says wait as per the last bullet, but the command still seems to run OK, just throws an error)

- Outlook 2016 can still book the room using Room Finder, they just don't get the 'Workspace' drop down.

- Remaining capacity is not shown in the room list. Only total capacity and availability status.

- Android App shows Floor, Outlook Client does not

- You can't select Features. It shows 'Not available for workspaces', even though you can set properties such as IsWheelChairAccessible
It's 2022/10 and most of the annoying things out of the list above are still there 😞 Any outlook to fix these soon? The_Exchange_Team ?
StephanGee
Steel Contributor
Sep 20, 2022
RaksChauhan
I tried it with PowerBI. Assigned myself "full owner" to the rooms. You might be able to achieve it with an "App registration"
Worked 😉 You can then created any report you want.
Ask you local PowerBI Pro for help 🙂
RaksChauhan
Brass Contributor
Sep 14, 2022
The_Exchange_Team - is there a way to get/export analytics/reports on Workspace Bookings? i.e a report to show number of bookings in a time period, who has booked, desk availability reports, etc
DaveTheTeamsGuy
Iron Contributor
Aug 30, 2022
The_Exchange_Team list of items / suggestions:

Would it be possible to not count additional required or optional attendees toward the available slots left in the workspace? Users may want to copy their supervisor on a workspace booking, and everyone copied counts toward the available slots in the space. This can cause underutilization for spaces with more than one slot and simply does not work for spaces with only a single slot. A workspace booking should be 1 to 1 between the person booking the space and the space. Any additional CC or optional should just be informational for the person copied.
Any way to decrement the "Available" count in Room Finder, before scheduling the room? Right now, you can only see remaining slots in the meeting acceptance response if you actually book the space.
The new "every meeting online" feature breaks workspace scheduling since you can't have a Teams Meeting and a Workspace together in the location field. Can this be fixed? Disabling Every Meeting Online isn't an option. Asking users to remove the Teams meeting from the location field when they schedule a meeting isn't an option.
FrankBastone
Brass Contributor
Aug 29, 2022
The_Exchange_Team can you please provide an update on this. We're in the process of confirming which way we will go in supporting temporary desk bookings, and as much as this looked promising at first, the comments made by various participants indicate that perhaps this isn't ready for use across all devices. Please confirm. Thanks.