Outlook Room Finder

A) What is Outlook Room Finder?

Outlook has a feature which enables you to look for meeting room availability in our London and regional offices.

Without this feature, you would have to open each meeting room calendars in Outlook and search through for available slots. The time you spent doing this might be a good few minutes but if you are organising for a group meetings with many rooms, this is where the Room Finder feature will efficiently help you book those rooms!

With Room Finder, you directly put in the date, start and end time, select the office you need to search for the meeting room, look for the room status "Available" and book it. See example for each office.

Before you continue, there are two things to ask of you.

1. Please click whether this guide is helpful or not when you finished.

2. You can submit directly to Microsoft for a feedback regarding Room Finder especially for features that Microsoft haven't thought about! It can be used by anyone and not just IT. Click here.

Birmingham - you can see the room status show "Available" based on the required date and time.

Newcastle - you can see the room status show "Available" based on the required date and time.

Leeds - you can see the room status show "Available" based on the required date and time.

Nottingham - the selected date and time is unavailable.

London - you can see a list of all the meeting rooms. London 3.01, 3.02 and 3.06 are Unavailable.

London - change to the following day shows only London 3.04 is available.

London - keep changing the date until you see availability.

B) Benefits of Room Finder

Save time and get instant response to your search for meeting room availability on any TF offices with meeting rooms. (You must book the room quickly before someone else does!)
The feature is accessible on both desktop and web version of Outlook as well as Teams. This means if you are using mobile Outlook while you are out of the office, you can instantly locate a room and book it on the go without needing to log in to your laptop.

C) Desktop vs Web version vs Teams vs Mobile version

You will notice there are some design differences on each applications. See below to learn more.

Desktop Outlook 2016 ver 2304 - shows availability, capacity (e.g. 14 delegates) and location (London)

Web version of Outlook 365 - shows availability, capacity (e.g. 14 delegates) and location (London)

Desktop Microsoft Teams ver 1.6 - shows Busy or Free only.

Settings in Room Finder

When you have Room Finder opened, our list of offices are under the "Building" drop down.

Select London for example

All London meeting rooms bookable by TF staff, London 3.03, 3.04, 3.05, 3.07, but not 3.01 and 3.06 for example.

D) Support for Poly Studio Conferencing System

If you need to know which room has the Poly Studio Conferencing system, they are currently in select offices for now.

London 3.10

London 3.08

London 3.07

London 3.06

London 3.05

London 3.04

London 3.03

London 3.02

London 3.01

Birmingham 02-G20

To see the quick guide for our Poly Studio, click here.

To see the full guide, click here.

E) How to Access Room Finder

Now you've seen the benefits and the differences between different applications, how do I access it? See below to learn how.

Desktop Outlook 2016 - ver 2304

In Outlook, switch to calendar. The Room Finder can be accessed through the following steps:

Under New Meeting or Teams Meeting > Room Finder
You can freely adjust the date and time and the room availability will update instantly.

Web version of Outlook 365

In Outlook 365, switch to calendar view. The Room Finder can be accessed through the following steps:

In New Event, drop down to select Event > Scheduling Assistant
in Rooms, click Add a room
Select Browse with Room Finder
Select the office under Building
Sometimes the drop down list may only show one office. This is a known glitch. To resolve just type in the office name (Nottingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham, London).
Otherwise you should see full list of other offices.
Select London for example.
You can freely change the date and time and the availability of each room status will instantly update.
There is a known glitch when changing the time, ie, you may experience the inability to move the bar/slider up or down.
You can rescue yourself by using the up and down arrow key to change the time and the slider will respond!

Mobile version of Outlook using mobile phone or tablet / ipad.

The layout of the mobile app version should be the same as the web version of Outlook 365. The only difference is you don't use a mouse to click your way through. There is a section where you might get stuck. The screenshot below is copied from the above so the mobile version may not have the slider if you get stuck.

You can rescue yourself by using your finger to either highlight the time and manually change it, or
if you can see the list of timeslot, select a time and see if moving it up and down let you select it.

Microsoft Desktop Teams ver 1.6

Switch over to Calendar and click New Meeting > Scheduling Assistant

Click Add Location
If this is your first time, you should see this
Select London for example. The view window is fixed so you need to slide down to see other rooms.
Just like the other applications mentioned earlier, you can freely adjust the date and time and you will instantly see the changing status of each room/
If you already accessed this feature before, then you will see this instead.
Click the back arrow to display other offices.

F) Summary

Over a period of time, it is normal for Microsoft to change the layout or re-locate Room Finder. This means the steps above may have changed in a year's time. You should benefit from following this guide and should hopefully improve your experience when searching for meeting rooms.

Thank you and should you find anything that is not covered above or find a new glitch that you cannot resolve, please reachout to us by raising a ticket on https://support.teachfirst.org.uk/ or call helpdesk directly.

Have a nice day!

5/7/2023