How to setup Room Finder on Exchange

Room Finder is a feature in Microsoft Exchange Online and Outlook that helps users find and book available meeting rooms. It displays room availability, capacity, location, and other facilities, making it easier to select a suitable meeting space when scheduling meetings. Behind the scenes, Room Finder represents collection of rooms grouped together by Exchange Distribution Groups. This is however more suitable and useful for rooms spread across several cities.

Imagine you need to add the following rooms into Room Finder:

• City 1
• Building 1
• Room 1
• Room 2
• Building 2
• Room 3
• Room 4
• City 2
• Building 1
• Floor 1
• Room 5
• Room 6
• Floor 2
• Room 7
• City 3
• Building 1
• Room 8

Steps to configure Room Finder in your environment

1. List down all existing Room Resources in your environment and group them by City, Building and Floor as above
2. Go to Exchange Admin Console (EAC) --> Room Resource and update the City field of all the rooms your want to add into Room Finder. You may use Set-Place command for this purpose.
3. Additionally, you may also set the floor parameter for your rooms using Set-Place command. Ex: Set-Place room1@yourdomain.com -Floor
4. Run Connect-ExchangeOnline (Run this beforehand if you intend to use Set-Place for previous steps)
5. To group rooms from Building 1 located in City 1,  run New-DistributionGroup -Name "City 1 Rooms - Building 1" -RoomList
6. Take note of the UPN (User Principal Name) of the distribution group created above
7. To add a room to the above, run Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity city1rooms-building1@yourdomain.com -Member room1@yourdomain.com
8. Continue to add more rooms as required ex: Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity city1rooms-building1@yourdomain.com -Member room2@yourdomain.com
9. Create another group and add rooms into it ex: New-DistributionGroup -Name "City 1 Rooms - Building 2" -RoomList
10. Run Get-DistributionGroup -RecipientTypeDetails RoomList to verify the creation of those groups
11. It may take up to 2 days for the Room List to update on Outlook client 
12. To summarise
1. You set the City field using EAC or PowerShell, this is compulsory.
2. Group them into Distribution Groups by City and Building using PowerShell
3. You may add other details such as the floor and capacity by updating the individual room resource. This is optional.
4. Users will be able to filter rooms by city and building and additionally by floor and capacity if configured.