Create Room List Office 365

Hello,

By default with Outlook, the user experience for finding an available room is not great. Indeed, you need to check each room if it’s free, and then, book it.

There is a feature that can improve that, this is called a “Room List”. You can create a room list that hold a list of rooms on which you can check availability easily. This allows you to group rooms by location, capacity, or every criteria you want.

Create Room List Office 365 – Full Cloud

If you want them in the Cloud, you can only create those lists from PowerShell with the Exchange Online cmdlet “New-DistributionGroup” and the “RoomList” parameter.

You can create a room list distribution groups for the HQ rooms with those two lines :

$RoomAlias = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox -Filter {Office -eq 'HQ'} | select -ExpandProperty Alias
New-DistributionGroup -RoomList -Name 'HQ' -Members $RoomAlias

Create Room List Office 365 – Synced Active Directory

If you have AADConnect (or DirSync, or AADSync) and an Active Directory with Exchange schema updates, you have another option. You can create a local group like this :

New-ADGroup -Name MySyncedRoomList -OtherAttributes @{msExchRecipientTypeDetails='268435456';mail='MySyncedRoomList@itfordummies.net'} -GroupCategory Security -GroupScope Global

Create Room List Office 365 – AADConnect and Active Directory

You need to create the group with an email address, and ‘msExchRecipientTypeDetails’ (Exchange attribute, that’s why you need the Exchange schema) set to ‘268435456’, this will indicate this group will be a RoomList group. Then, you just need to add rooms AD account to this group, and wait for AADConnect to sync it to the cloud.

Use Room List Office 365 in Outlook

Once created, you will see the list in the “Room Finder” tab of Outlook :

Create Room List Office 365 – New Dropdown list

Create Room List Office 365 – Room List

Then, you can use it to make your room booking way more easier for your users :

Create Room List Office 365 – UX

This will automatically tell you how many rooms are available for your meeting and show them for you to select the one you want. Once the room selected, you can send the invite, the room will be booked for you.

Note : If you can’t see your rooms inside your room list in Outlook, you may want to wait for your Global Address List (GAL) update, or force an Offline Address Book (OAB) download.

Here is how to force an OAB download from Outlook 2016 :

Force Offline Address Book Download

The process is pretty similar across each version of Outlook.