Creating a Conference Room List for Outlook's Room Finder

Microsoft Outlook has a nifty feature called Room Finder which shows you (you guessed it) rooms that are available when scheduling a meeting.  This is super handy especially when looking for a room when you are remote.  Unfortunately, Microsoft 365 does not have a UI to do this (yet).  Here's how you can create a room list, set the room's location, and add a room to a room list with PowerShell!

For us, we're going to be using Azure's Cloud Shell and running PowerShell that way.  With Cloud Shell, you'll need to connect to Exchange admin by running the following:

Connect-EXOPSSession

Create a Room List

A room list is a group of rooms that a user will see. For example, you can call this "Conference Rooms" and place all of your conference rooms inside the list. Other suggestions are: Phone Rooms, Huddle Spaces, etc.

New-DistributionGroup -Name 'Conference Rooms' -RoomList

Assigning Rooms to Lists

Now that we have our list, we want to add rooms to it.

Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity 'Conference Rooms' -Member '[email protected]'

Assigning Room to a Physical Location

Lastly, we'll add our conference room to a physical office location so that our users can easily find it.

Set-Place -Identity 'ConfRoom[email protected]' -Building '1 Example Drive' -CountryOrRegion US

Going Further

Additional Flags for Set-Place

• -AudioDeviceName 'Polycom Studio X50'
• -Capacity 50
• -City 'New York'
• -Phone 123-456-7890
• -Floor 1
• -FloorLabel Accounting

Additional Reading

• Set-Place on Microsoft Learn