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Easily book rooms in Outlook

Feature deep dive
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Hi, Office Insiders! I’m Victoria Rodriguez, a Program Manager on the Outlook team. I’m excited to share that you can easily book rooms in Outlook thanks to a few updates. It can be difficult to book recurring meetings and find rooms that have the resources you need. We’re releasing new features that make finding the room you need easier.

Easily book rooms

You can now search for rooms with specific characteristics that are needed for your meeting. For example, you can filter for rooms based on your group size, the features you require, and the floor it is located on under the Capacity, Features, and Floor sections.

Image of room booking details in meeting

Image of room booking details in meeting

 

Recurring meetings

Creating a series of meetings can be a bit hectic. We’re simplifying the process by showing when a room is free for your entire series. If no room is available for the duration of the series, we’ll show you rooms that are available most of the time and indicate the number of instances for which they are available.

Image of room booking details in meeting

 

Book multiple rooms

Our teams are spread across the world these days. Outlook now lets you book multiple rooms so you can make sure everyone can attend the meeting from a practical location. To give it a try, go to the Room Finder and search by the city, then add the rooms you need.

Image of room booking details in meeting

Image of room booking details in meeting

 

Requirements

Couple things to note:

Image of Microsoft Edge Beta Channel popup

  • The new features described above rely on the new Set-Place cmdlet, which is only available in Exchange Online. They will not be included in any on-prem versions of Exchange Server.

As shown below, there are multiple properties you can set on a room mailbox that users can then use to filter room.

For example:

Image of properties on a room mailbox.

Be sure to carefully plan which properties you want to set and make available to your users. Here’s a full list of properties you can set:

Image of full list of properties for meeting invite

Availability

This feature is available to Beta Channel users running Office Version 2007 Build 13020.20004 or later. We will keep this feature in the Beta Channel until we no longer require customers to install the Microsoft Edge Beta.

We typically release features over some time to ensure that things are working smoothly. This is true for Insiders as well. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as Insiders, have had the opportunity to try them.

Feedback

If you have any feedback or suggestions, you can submit them by clicking Help > Feedback.

Learn what other information you should include in your feedback to ensure  it’s actionable and reaches the right people. We’re excited to hear from you! 

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