Room Finder shows no rooms if meeting starts outside client Work Hours (in Outlook desktop app)

Iron Contributor

My company has set up a Room List with a number of hoteling workstations (as Room resources) for our hybrid workers to be able to reserve using Outlook, but we noticed that the Room Finder shows "None" in the "Choose an available room" box in a few cases even when there are actually many workstations available during the hours specified:

 

  • If the Meeting's Start Time is outside of the user's Outlook desktop client "Work hours" setting (in Options -> Calendar -> Work time)
  • If the Meeting's Start Time is within the user's Outlook desktop client "Work hours" setting, but the End Time is the next day
  • If the Meeting has the "All Day" checkbox option checked

We tried to set the Rooms' Working Hours to be "all day" (or at least to Start at 00:00:00), but that did not fix the Room Finder -- it still failed to suggest the Room if the Meeting Start was before my desktop client's Work Hours start time.

 

(Incidentally, the Room Finder seems to struggle / fail to properly refresh in a variety of cases, too, especially when using Room Lists. Changing from the named Room List we created to None seems to  generally work, but changing back does not always force a refresh. Also, changing the Meeting start/end by clicking around in the Scheduling Assistant does not always refresh the Room Finder, either. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.)

 

The Room Finder in the Outlook web app works for all of these cases, though. Well, kinda... it will always show whether a Room is "available" even if the Meeting start/end is outside of the Room's Working Hours, which may not actually be desirable. I guess for multi-day meetings/reservations, though, you would not want the Working Hours of the Room to prevent making a reservation -- that'd make long reservations much more difficult to make.

 

FYI, I'm a GCC tenant, on Windows 10, Outlook Version 2106 (Build 14131.20278 Click-To-Run) Current Channel, Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise.

 

Oh, and we have set up the Rooms to have a few restrictions/settings: Max 24 hour reservations, auto-accepted, max 1 concurrent reservation, cannot schedule >30 days out. I believe the default Working Hours for the Rooms is 8am-5pm, but we tried setting one to be from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 and that did not fix the issue. (Setting it from 00:00:00 to 00:00:00 caused it to show up in Scheduling Assistant with all hours labeled "Outside of working hours" but also did not fix the issue. Oddly, the default hours do not show up as "Outside" -- it appears to be available 24 hours/day otherwise?)

 

Client work hours setting:

jrbpt_0-1626220100096.png

 

Room Finder showing no results even though there is availability:

jrbpt_1-1626220489777.png

 

Has anyone encountered this? Anyone have any workarounds? Ideally we'd like for users to get useful Room Finder suggestions even if their desktop client Work Hours start later than they'd want their reservation to be, and also if they use the All Day checkbox.

 

Thanks much!

Jamie

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