Book a workspace in Outlook

[The_Exchange_Team]

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?

1. 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.
2. Set the “Show as” status to “Free” so the invite doesn’t block your calendar.
3. Open the “Room finder” by selecting the location input and then “Browse with Room Finder”.
4. 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).
5. Browse available workspaces. Availability is shown based on if there is at least one available space for the duration of this booking.
6. 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

[Deleted]

Is the timescale for Workplaces to appear in the graph on the places API?

[heptinstallm]

The concept of building is somewhat confusing.

When using Get-Place there is a specific Building property but this article doesn't use it, instead a Building is a distribution group Room List which gets stored in the Localities property on a mailbox.

What is the OWA room finder using when searching for Building? This appears to find distribution group Room Lists by their name and the Building and City properties set on a mailbox/workspace are ignored (e.g. ones which aren't part of a Room List)

[JacovandenBerg]

Hi, we have setup things as described. It turns out, some calculations errors are made.

our case: a workplace of 3 seats

first person books and gets replied:

'Kantoor' has enough capacity for your request.
Total capacity: 3. Available: 3. Attendees in this request: 1. Remaining: 2

second person books and gets replied: 

 'Kantoor' has enough capacity for your request.
Total capacity: 3. Available: 1. Attendees in this request: 1. Remaining: 0

What happened to the third seat ?

[vrod29]

Hi folks,

We are seeing an issue in Outlook windows client where the seat count is being reduced by 2 when only 1 person books a workspace. We are working on fixing this bug. In the meantime we advise customers to use any other Outlook client. 

Please open a support ticket if you need further help. 

[vrod29]

Yes room list are structured like buildings in  Outlook. 

[Sai Gutta]

@Darren O'Leary  - Were you able to get the building list to show up?

I noticed that when you start typing in the field it shows up.

[Darren O'Leary]

@Sai Gutta - Yes, although like you it doesn't show immediately for me in the drop down field, until I start typing. Not ideal, but we can work around this. It would be better if the drop down field displayed this though without having to type!

[khongnguduoc]

Hi everyone,

After booking a meeting with a workspace, I received an "Accept" email like this

And I really want to know Is there a way that I can get the "Remaining" info as in the image using EWS or MS Graph?

Thanks in advance.

[JonathanSpohnholtz]

Hi @vrod29,

We are still facing the issue, where the seat count is being reduced by 2 when booking a workspace through the desktop client. Do you have any idea, when the fix will be available?

Cheers!

[vrod29]

Hey @JonathanSpohnholtz this issue should be resolved within the next 2 weeks. I will ping this thread once it is fixed. In the meantime please consider using Outlook mobile or web. 

[heptinstallm]

@vrod29 is the issue on the backend or will this require updating the Outlook windows client to the latest version?

[vrod29]

@heptinstallm It is a backend issue so you should not have to update your Outlook windows client. 

[vrod29]

Hi folks! If you are interested/need help in deploying the workspace booking feature in your environment please send me a private message. I would like to get your input on what is needed and work with your account manager to get your company set up. Thanks and stay safe!

[chrischambersau]

@vrod29tried to send you a PM but getting errors saying I can't send PM's at the moment. We're trying to deploy Workspaces for a number of clients as Australia slowly returns to normal however cannot get the solution to work at all - common issues we've had are:

Your meeting was declined - total capacity = 0 yet a Get-Place output for the room shows a capacity of say 10

No response received - Test users receive no response from the room to acknowledge their booking request

As far as your question around what can be done to make this easier: Well rounded documentation with example syntax's - there's a fair bit of 'fill in the blanks' and work it out from the announcement page.

Feel free to reach out to me via PM if needed

[pmattias]

We can see the Workspaces in OWA and on mobile clients but not in Outlook for Windows.  We only get the screen shown by @Darren O'Leary  on Sept 30th. @vrod29 you mention that Outlook for Windows would follow the room finder roll out, but there is not apparent schedule to speak of there.  Is there any update for this?

[Deleted]

Hi @vrod29 we were successfully using the graph api to book workspaces, but we have now found that we are getting

Spaces can not be booked as attendees: 'zxxxxx'; Location: ''. denied confirmations back from workspaces.

This is the graph code I'm using, this code was working fine last week, only seems to be on certain resources as well, the issue also persists when booking through Outlook Web

      const e: MicrosoftGraph.Event = {
        subject: "Workspace Booking",
        showAs: "workingElsewhere",
        body: { contentType: "text", content: "Workspace Booking" },
        start: { dateTime: c.toJSON(), timeZone: "GMT Standard Time" },
        end: { dateTime: c2.toJSON(), timeZone: "GMT Standard Time" },
        location:{ displayName: room.name, locationEmailAddress: room.email, locationType: "conferenceRoom" },
        attendees: [
          {
            emailAddress: { address: room.email, name: room.name },
            type: "resource"
          }
        ],
        allowNewTimeProposals: false
      };
     
      client.api('/me/events').post(e, (error) => {
        if (error) {
          alert(error.message);
          console.error(error);
        } else {  }
        setTimeout(() => { this.reload(this.state.date); this.reloadEvents(); }, 1000);
      });

[KatrinF]

@vrod29 The mentioned 2 weeks are long over. When will the bug be resolved? My company is desperately waiting to roll this out. We have already set everything up and running, despite this bug that books 2 seats instead of 1.

[Eric Watkins]

I am not sure if this is a common issue or not, but my company syncs our local AD to Microsoft, so we have a local exchange management server (no mailboxes, NOT hybrid mode), so we can modify exchange attributes that sync to the cloud.  When we setup a mailbox, we thus use the new-remotemailbox and set-remotemailbox commands, which populates exchange attributes in our AD, but creates a cloud mailbox.  When doing this, it seems the remotemailbox commands do not support the type "workspace", is there plans to remedy this, or is this just a way of saying i need to apply the latest update to my on prem management box :)?

[alec147]

We are looking for a way in Outlook to book desks and report desk usage so we can direct cleaners to apply COVID cleaning methods if a desk has been used. From my brief reading here it appears booking desks can be achieved using this method but is there a way to report on desk usage?

Thanks in advance

[eFlymann]

We are in hybrid enviroment and we are also (like Eric) using new-remotemailbox to cerate room mailboxes (on local Exchange server). We are also facing with "workspace" issue:

Cannot process argument transformation on parameter 'Type'. Cannot convert value "Workspace" to type "Microsoft.Exchang
e.Management.RecipientTasks.ConvertibleMailboxSubType". Error: "Unable to match the identifier name Workspace to a vali
d enumerator name. Specify one of the following enumerator names and try again:
Regular, Shared, Room, Equipment"

is there any documentation related to hybrid enviroment and systems requirements to make it work?

Thank you in advance

[CuSmith]

What is the status of Workspace in Outlook? I have seen very little in documentation by Microsoft and virtually nothing last July.  Is Microsoft still supporting this as a solution?

Regards,

CuSmith

[JC1]

Like others have asked what plans are being done for this for the remotemailbox commands in a hybrid environment?

Also are there plans for adding workspaces to the GUI. I have trained our Level 1 people to create and manage mailboxes in the Exchange Management Console. They do not have enough expertise to use PowerShell reliably. 

Regards

[Eric Watkins]

Just checking in again, it seems info and promotion of this solution ground to a halt after September, but it really did look like a great move to get ahead of requested changes for the change in physical work setups.

Is there any plan to handle enterprises that sync their AD to the cloud (or hybrid mode for other folks), and thus use the remotemailbox commands rather than just the mailbox cmdlets?  What about the bug many mentioned where multiple seats were getting allocated from a single request?

[Dogga_Suresh_Babu]

What is the status of Workspace rollout in Outlook? We have been waiting since the announcement to Go-Live in our Environment. Is there any plans to rollout atleast coming month ?

[smcmullan88]

Is there any more details on the rollout to the Outlook apps?  Seeing some real inconsistencies across Android, iOS, macOS and Windows applications.

[smcmullan88]

Also a few bugs to mention:

• when booking the workspace in outlook app on windows desktop or Mac you have to start typing the building in or it won’t show up which means you will see the no available workspace option.  You would rather have the buildings show up in a drop down format
• it doesn’t work at all on owa on iOS 
• On outlook app on iOS it shows the buildings when you select book a workspace and then it shows no workspace available even though you can see them on macOS and windows

[e-helg]

The issue described by Ben_Phung does still exists (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/book-a-workspace-in-outlook/bc-p/1719199/h...).
A minimal setup for showcase the issue would be:

Setup:
Create a workspace with capacity 2.
E.g.
1. New-Mailbox -Room "dev-desk-01" | Set-Mailbox -Type Workspace
2. Set-Place -Identity "dev-desk-01" -Capacity 2
3. Set-CalendarProcessing "dev-desk-01" -EnforceCapacity $True -MinimumDurationInMinutes 180

Steps:

1. From outlook create the event "Working during morning", use RoomFinder to add "dev-desk-01", with a duration from 08:00 - 12:00
   1. A mail response about the request being accepted is received: 
      'dev-desk-01' has enough capacity for your request. Total capacity: 2. Available: 2. Attendees in this request: 1. Remaining: 1
2. From outlook create the event "Working all day", use RoomFinder to add "dev-desk-01", with a duration from 08:00 - 17:00
   1. A mail response about the request being accepted is received: 
      'dev-desk-01' has enough capacity for your request. Total capacity: 2. Available: 1. Attendees in this request: 1. Remaining: 0.
3. From outlook create the event "Working Afternoon", use RoomFinder to add "dev-desk-01", with a duration from 13:00 - 17:00
   1. A mail response about the request being denied is received: 
      Your request was declined because there are conflicts.
      

      The conflicts are:  Organizer and Time of Conflicting Meeting
      <users name redacted> - Friday, March 19, 2021 8:00:00 AM to Friday, March 19, 2021 5:00:00 PM

This makes no sense, since only one user is attending the workspace during the afternoon.

Expectation:

The event for "Working Afternoon" is accepted, with the capacity droping down to 0 afterwards between 13:00 and 17:00.

Notes:
As noted in the referenced issue, if the order of the bookings where different it does work as expected.

If the order would be: 2 -1 - 3 instead, then the afternoon booking works. It is however the only case where it works as expected.

This isn't feasible, since you aren't able to syncronize the order you do your bookings in an organization to that level, as from what the blod post describes, one would think Workspaces have set out to solve the issue, not be dependent on something else solving it for it.

[TimMaySuperdry]

Hi,

We are currently testing Workspaces, with a view to returning to the office at some point! 

We are seeing some strange behaviour during our testing. When booking from the iOS app, the booked time appears as free in the user's calendar however when booking from OWA the time is set to busy, and the appointment must be edited to set it to free.

Has anyone else has this problem? If so, please could they assist, on how we should troubleshoot?

[wastedtime9]

How do we get the modern Room Finder UI in outlook, as pictured in the article? 

[Francisco_Leyva]

When will workspaces be available to government accounts?

[Jehan SNYERS D'ATTENHOVEN]

Is there a way to see the remaining capacity of a workplace prior to book it ?

Inside Outlook, I see no update of the room capacity, unless I book and get the booking confirmation.

[Luke Lawrence]

Hi, We've started to deploy this to our Online locations and aside from some known issues (in the lists above) it is working OK, but we have about 20% of our users (all in Sweden) that exist in Exchange onpremise configured in hybrid with exchange online. When will the necessary updates be available for Exchange to enable workspace bookings?

Thanks.. Luke

[Julzc113]

Will Room features be available for workspaces in the future?   

[NMLVS]

I would like to echo the comments around Hybrid Environments. 

This article is not very clear in explaining what to do when you are in hybrid, the -workspace switch is not available in on-prem environments, so do you just have to build cloud objects direct in the ExchangeOnline shell?

Or do you build on-prem with New-Remote* , then run the -workspace switch in the ExchangeOnline Shell?

Is Workspace's available to on-prem users? Or only Exchange Online users?

Will it available for Outlook 2016 (I assume not, but where's the documentation)? Or only Outlook365 / Outlook 2019?

There needs to be an official Microsoft documentation site for this product with all of the relevant information.

[NMLVS]

Your instructions are unclear here also for Hybrid, the list in the text is different to the list that is bulletpointed.

Please can you verify which properties you need to set on-prem.

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

[NMLVS]

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

[Michael Baker]

Great - so now we need PowerBI dashboard integration to provide Build managers and BCD / HS and end users live capacity reports and distribution.

[MSeawright]

Looking forward to using Outlook workspaces

[Jasper Bernaers]

@Darren O'Leary -- I've put a technical blog on this website for instruction for Workspaces: Making Workspaces available in Outlook | Exchange Online (365tips.be) @MSeawright 

[BramV]

This is nice but the process of adding floor plans is really cumbersome. Please take into account smaller companies who don't have proper autocad drawings.

You also need to set a fixed room for at least 10 people for the system to start working... but we only have bookable workspaces, no one has a fixed room.

Just a simple image upload where you can pin rooms/workspaces would make things so easy.

[salihzett]

Same as @TimMaySuperdry 

Why it is possible to control "shown as free" out of the box for iOS but not for Windows, macOS, or OWA?

Maybe @The_Exchange_Team should define this Workspace typ different as Rooms (such as Conference Rooms) so Exchange can change the status to free in the backend independently from the status on the client.

For now, this workflow looks like it is not complelty done. just almost. 

[salihzett]

Can anyone explain me the intention to use CustomAttribute11? I dont see any usage. Cheers

[Jarrad_McMullen]

@vrod29 Another thing found with Outlook for Windows to add to @NMLVS's list: When viewing the workspace calendar in day/work week/week/month view, all bookings show up correctly. However, when a user is using "Schedule View" the bookings don't show up correctly. No bookings are shown until the room is at max capacity for a given time (this seems to be due to the bookings being shown as "free" until the booking that hits the capacity limit is booked (which is marked as busy).

[Raechel Moermond]

I have a customer using workspaces now, and they think it's great!  It's a really nice feature and allows them to come back to work safely...especially since they hired more people in the last year than they actually currently have seats for.

The problem is "booking type".  They do have a few permanently assigned seats, but they wanted workspaces created for those places as well (if a user is on extended leave, vacation, gets hit by the IT bus, etc. and that space is available for a period of time, they'd like to use it).  So, me being me, I thought I'd set the booking type on those spaces to "reserved" as outlined in the "set-calendarprocessing" Microsoft Doc:

-BookingType

This parameter is available only in the cloud-based service.

The BookingType parameter specifies how reservations work on the resource mailbox. Valid values are:

• Standard: The resource can be reserved based on the other settings in this cmdlet. This is the default value
• Reserved: The resource can't be reserved.

Problem is...it doesn't work.  A workspace that has a booking type of "reserved" can still be booked.  I opened up a support ticket and after weeks of nothing, I got "expected results were not as per the article".  Basically, setting the booking type to "reserved" and still being able to book it is expected behavior and the article is wrong.

We are currently using the workaround of setting the capacity for those spaces to 0 so any requests to those spaces are declined.  But that's a **bleep** workaround.  Any thoughts on why "booking type" isn't working?

[alex_ha19]

Hi,

in the article it said on Outlook (Android) there should be setting for the calendar to enable workspace booking.

Well I dont see any setting like that in my Outlook on Android.

Any idea whats wrong?

[Jarrad_McMullen]

@alex_ha19 - As long as you have Workspaces created in Exchange and are using the latest Outlook App, the option to "Book Workspace" should be automatically available. I am using iOS so may be slightly different but on the App, hold down on the plus symbol and you should see "Book Workspace", "New Event" & "New Message".

If you have only just created your first Workspace it can take a couple of days for the workspace options/filters to appear. They should enable automatically eventually once Microsoft's syncs catch up.

[alex_ha19]

ah ok, yes only created the workspace yesterday, so I will give it a bit more time

[CGCal]

@alex_ha19 , both iOS and Android versions of the Outlook app has issues with the "Workspace booking" toggle option.

Namely, the toggle option is nowhere to be found on both platforms. It should be right under "week numbers".

I just contacted Microsoft support and the agent told me he logged in a bug fix request, so it should be fixed in the next releases for both platforms.

The workspace booking toggle option used to be there, because I've got it working before.

[alex_ha19]

@CGCal ah thanks. Well yes I dont have a toggle option on iOS either, even after waiting a few days as suggested. On iOS its strange though, because when I hold the "+" icon in the calendar I see an option for Workspace Booking, but when I tap it, nothing happens.

[Jarrad_McMullen]

@alex_ha19 Our "Book a Workspace" option has stopped working too now and my colleague on Android doesn't even get the option. It was definitely working previously as I personally used it last month to create internal documentation so as @CGCal said it looks like the current app versions have broken the feature and we will have to wait for the next releases for a fix.

In the meantime, to make sure your workspaces are set up and ready for when the app fix rolls out, you can use with OWA and Outlook Windows Desktop (Current or Monthly Enterprise Channels) as they should now have the Workspace "Type" available in the Room Finder:

@The_Exchange_Team - It would be good if features, such as workspaces, were fully tested with the App Dev team before versions went public globally as we are now left with thousands of employees being told to workaround through webmail to book workspaces instead of the app which isn't ideal in the middle of a hybrid working push.