Or How to Use Set-Place to Configure Your Meeting Rooms or How Wheelchair Users Can Find The Best Meeting Rooms In Your Organization etc. – there are many different titles I can think of for this blog post. They are all to do with setting useful properties against your meeting rooms so that your users can find the best rooms.
As of the time of writing (updated July 2020), “Outlook Places” service exposes a client-side UX only in Outlook on the web (OWA) with Outlook for Windows and Mac due by end of August 2020. Given Microsoft’s previous behaviour of flighting Exchange Online features for one client initially before rolling them out to other clients, this is likely to hit Outlook mobile etc. at some point after that. Therefore I recommend that you update all your room properties now using the PowerShell cmdlet Set-Place so that your users are able to find meeting rooms and other resources upon the functionality appearing in their client.
The Exchange Online Management Shell cmdlet Set-Place allows you to configure properties such as if the room is accessible for wheelchair users (hence the title of this blog post), or what AV equipment it holds or indeed how many people the room can hold (comfortably!). As this information, especially in a large organization, is probably known by many different people and requires the input of these different users to maintain a master list, this blog post will look at the process of creating this list and then importing it back into Exchange Online when updated.
Creating A Master Room Metadata List
From Exchange Online Management Shell run the following:
Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-Place | Export-CSV OrganizationRooms.csv -NoClobber -NoTypeInformation
Open the file, here called OrganizationRooms.csv in Excel. I removed the first three columns (PSComputerName,RunspaceId,PSShowComputerName) as well as Type, ResourceDelegates, IsManaged, BookingType and Localities and the last two columns (IsValid and ObjectState) from this file and then save it as an Excel file to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online and shared it with the relevant facilities management and other interested parties (don’t share it as a CSV file, as multiple users cannot edit a csv file in real time). We wait for this information to be updated. If you wish you could lock out cells from being edited such as Identity and maybe DisplayName so that future updating of existing rooms is easy to do.
Specifically we are looking at information such as location (physical street/city address, building name [for campus type organizations], floor number and GeoCoordinates), AV equipment (such as audio, video, display devices and room phone number), accessibility for wheelchair users, and miscellaneous tags (in the form of a comma separated list such as “Conference Room”,Lecture,“Tiered Seating”) that users could use in their room search. There are tools to generate geo-coordinates from addresses that you can find online and they are required as latitude;longitude;altitude (where altitude is optional)
Updating Room Metadata in Exchange Online
To upload the new data, save the shared Excel spreadsheet as a CSV file again and run the following Exchange Online Management Shell script:
$OrganizationRooms = Import-Csv .\OrganizationRooms.csv
ForEach ($Room in $OrganizationRooms) {
[Boolean]$IsWheelChairAccessible = [System.Convert]::ToBoolean($Room.IsWheelChairAccessible)
Set-Place -Identity $Room.Identity -Street $Room.Street -City $Room.City -State $Room.State -PostalCode $Room.PostalCode -CountryOrRegion $Room.CountryOrRegion -GeoCoordinates $Room.GeoCoordinates -Phone $Room.Phone -Capacity $Room.Capacity -Building $Room.Building -Label $Room.Label -AudioDeviceName $Room.AudioDeviceName -VideoDeviceName $Room.VideoDeviceName -DisplayDeviceName $Room.DisplayDeviceName -IsWheelChairAccessible $IsWheelChairAccessible -Floor $Room.Floor -Tags $Room.Tags
Set-Mailbox $Room.Identity -DisplayName $Room.DisplayName
}
In the above code I have not included attributes from Get-Place that I cannot write back such as IsManaged, BookingType and Localities – I am interested though in knowing what they are used for as they are undocumented?
The above code just replaces the current values in Exchange Online with the values in the spreadsheet, so the spreadsheet becomes your master.
Note that values with spaces need to be quoted in the CSV – such as tags and various display names. Also it is worth being aware that with conference bridges and Teams meetings, room “capacity” is not always as important as it might sound – a room with a capacity of 3 people will work fine if everyone is remote! Booking multiple rooms for a single meeting is also planned.
If the room object is synced from on-premises Active Directory then you can still use Set-Place to update the object in the cloud. The previous way of setting some of these properties (i.e. City) used Set-User and that needed to be run against the source of the object (that is, if synced you needed to run Set-User on-premises against Active Directory).
Set-Place can be viewed at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/mailboxes/set-place?view=exchange-ps
Exchange Server
All rooms and resources that you manage via the steps in the blog post need to be Exchange Online resources. If the mailbox is still on Exchange Server and not moved to Exchange Online in a hybrid scenario, you are not able query and set the information in Get-Place or Set-Place
But that does not mean you cannot get ready for the day that you move those resources (rooms) to Exchange Online. On Exchange Server you can run the following Exchange Management Shell PowerShell and get a csv file with exactly the same columns as above. Get the spreadsheet filled in as mentioned above and then when you move the room to Exchange Online and update Set-Place, the room will be found and updated.
Set-ADServerSettings -ViewEntireForest $true
Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Select Identity,DisplayName,Street,City,State,PostalCode,CountryOrRegion,GeoCoordinates,IsManaged,BookingType,ResourceDelegates,Phone,Capacity,Building,Label,AudioDeviceName,VideoDeviceName,DisplayDeviceName,IsWheelChairAccessible,Floor,FloorLabel,Tags,Localities,SpaceType,CustomSpaceType,IsValid,ObjectState | Export-CSV OrganizationRooms-OnPremises.csv -NoClobber -NoTypeInformationUser Room Search Experience
At the time of writing (July 2020) this experience is rolling out to Outlook, having been in OWA for about a year. The new experience will use the “Outlook Places” backend service, which Set-Place we used above populates.
To view and search for rooms based on these settings you need (for now) to wait 24 hours from using Set-Place before the property can be searched. You then create a new event in OWA calendar and click “Search for a room or location” and then click “+ Browse more rooms”.
The suggested rooms listed are those you have used or attended meetings at recently, but if you click in the “Search for a city or room list” box you can either enter a city or room list name (suggest naming your room lists after buildings) and click “Show all rooms” or click the City or Room List name:
This allows the “Filters” option to become available, where you can filter for capacity (rooms larger than) or properties such as audio/video or accessible rooms.
Once you have set the features you need, click Apply and select the room you need for the meeting. Being able to book multiple rooms for a single meeting is coming to Office 365 in the next few weeks from writing this article as well – imagine booking a meeting where people attend remotely but the remote location is another office.
Call To Action
Even though this “places” functionality does not reach all the Office email/calendaring clients (yet), this should not be a reason not to do this categorization work. Its quite easy to generate a list of all the rooms and their current settings (see above) as a spreadsheet. Its more work to update that list, but if you have a list then you can start. Rooms don’t often change their status regarding accessibility etc. but if you start cataloguing your rooms now or add this work to an Exchange Server migration project, then your users will benefit as the functionality reaches the client they use.
If you don’t update your places metadata, then clients will be unable to successfully find meeting rooms.
