Teams Meetings Location .... Not Showing up for you ?

 Most of what we do in the technical world is founded on following instructions. From the time we were young, assembling models, to fixing cars and motorcycles, to implementing technical solutions and designing software - we follow instructions, guides and videos - and we mix in trial and error.

Recently I was working on a demonstration for a customer, and tripped across something I expected to be easy, or at least easy to find guidance. For the sake of the customers I support, I try to find the most official form of guidance, and usually start with Microsoft Learn documentation .... but in this case, I struggled to find clear guidance regarding Meeting Location definition when setting up a Teams Meeting.

The goal for the demo, Show how small conference rooms without a Meeting Room Device (Teams MTR) can be offered for Wellness Rooms and Focus time, and have a Teams Panel outside the room to visually display room availability. Sounds like a pretty straight forward setup, used often, and now much more important with many enterprises returning to offices, or offering hybrid work options.

As I set up the demo, I ran into the hurdle, this post will hopefully help others who find the same.

  

As I mentioned, the overall goal was to set up a Room Resource, with mailbox, and also assign a Shared Device license for the Teams Room Panel. This activity in itself is not terribly challenging. You might want to start in the M365 Admin Center to create the user account and assign the Shared Device License for the Panel. My first advisory, don't start by creating a user account for a room - the panel will work, BUT with one unintended consequence - the panel will not display the person who booked the room, and will show the meeting title which most people prefer to be obscured with shared devices and panels.

Not Obscured

Correctly Presented

So instead, start in Exchange Admin, or in the M365 Admin Center - Under Resources -> Rooms ... and create a room resource account. (You may already do this, but did want to point out the experience difference when ROOM type is not used)

From here, once created, you will have the right room resource, mailbox for scheduling, and you can assign a Shared Device license for the panel, assuming you don't have an MTR in the room. (when MTR IS in the room, your panel can use the MTR account to link the panel, MTR, and room scheduling with a common calendar)

 Users now see the room available as an attendee.

BUT - the room really isn't a person, not attending the meeting. The room is a room with a location and the location is not found.

At this point Outlook doesn't recognize the room as a location, and Teams knows its a room and shouldn't be invited as an attendee.

So - we have to take a few extra steps, to identify the room's location. This is done through Exchange Powershell. (Technically we could have created the room resource in Powershell using the New-Mailbox and Set-Mailbox cmdlet  - feel free to look that one up on your own)

The extra steps needed:

1. Create a Distribution Group using RoomList- NewDistributionGroup
2. Add the Conf Room Resource to the Distribution Group - Add-DistributionGroupMember
3. Set the location of the room - Set-Place -Identity

New-DistributionGroup -Name "Focus Rooms" -RoomList

Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "Focus Rooms" -Member "WellnessRoom"

Set-Place -Identity "WellnessRoom" -Building "Main Office"

The input and output looks like this

Note - if you have multiple rooms to add to a Distribution Group, you can use the following PS:

$AddConf = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails Room Mailbox -Filter {Office -eq 'YOUR OFFICE NAME'} | Select -Expand Property Alias

$AddConf | Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "YOUR DG NAME"

Now both Outlook and Teams recognizes Wellness Room as a location and room.

And there you have it ... a room with panel with location in Teams calendar.