Populating Location Data for the Outlook Places Service

Posted on by Tony Redmond

How Outlook Clients Use the Places Service to Display Location Information

Updated January 2020.

Exchange Online has a new Outlook Places service that’s designed to help users find meeting locations, notably with room mailboxes. A new “suggested calendar locations” feature (Office 365 notification MC187963, roadmap 20974) makes use of the location data to suggest meeting locations for new events. The data is also used in the OWA room card as described on Dec 20, 2019 in MC198678, roadmap 59430.

Populating Places

To make sure that the Outlook Places service works well and to prepare for whatever use Microsoft puts the Places service in the future, you should update room metadata that the service can consume and present to users. Currently, clients search for meeting locations using room mailbox names and room lists (Outlook desktop) together with suggested locations based on what the user enters in the Location field. Outlook creates suggested locations using the Bing Locations API.

Because room names are common across all clients, it’s best to make sure that the name assigned to a room helps users understand where it is located. You can supplement the information by updating the Places entry for a room with information like a label, building, floor number, and geocoordinates.

Updating Place Information for Room Mailboxes

The Set-Place cmdlet updates the location metadata for a room mailbox. For example:

# Set the location metadata for a room mailbox
Set-Place -Identity "San Francisco Room" -CountryOrRegion "US" -City "San Francisco" -Floor 1 -Capacity 54 -Street "10 Sutter Street" -GeoCoordinates "37.790507; -122.400274" -Building "Western HQ" -State CA -PostalCode 94104 -Phone “+1 206 177 4151" -Label "Training" -VideoDeviceName "Crestron Flex UC-M150-T" -Tags Training, Development, Videoconference

Note that the CountryOrRegion parameter uses the two-character ISO country code.

Time-based assistants running in the background synchronize information for room mailboxes to the Places service. OWA fetches information from the Places service to display place information about locations in room cards (Figure 1).

How OWA displays location metadata in meeting details Outlook Places Service
Figure 1: How OWA displays location metadata in meeting details

Updating OWA Mailbox Policies

Note that OWA doesn’t display place information (like the map shown in Figure 1) if the PlacesEnabled setting in the OWA mailbox policy assigned to user mailboxes is set to $False. This might be the case if you have multiple policies as Microsoft only automatically updated the default OWA mailbox policy for tenants to set PlacesEnabled to $True. When PlacesEnabled is set to $False, OWA doesn’t display the extended place information in the room card and limits the information to whatever’s defined for the room mailbox.

To make sure that users can access the information you populate for places, update OWA mailbox policies as follows:

# Update all OWA mailbox policies in a tenant to allow use of Place information by OWA
Get-OWAMailboxPolicy | ? {$_.PlacesEnabled -eq $False} | Set-OWAMailboxPolicy -PlacesEnabled $True

Finding Place Information

The Get-Place cmdlet returns details of room mailboxes and their location metadata.

Get-ExoMailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox | Get-Place | Format-Table DisplayName, Building, Floor

DisplayName               Building   Floor
-----------               --------   -----
Dublin Conference Room    Building 1     1
Las Vegas Conference Room
Room 101
Room 102
Room 103
Room 104                  HQ             1
SF Room 101               Western HQ     1

Finding GeoCoordinates for Locations

You’ll notice that the geocoordinates for the location are included in the metadata for a room mailbox. Outlook uses geocoordinates to retrieve map information to help users find the building where a room is located. The easiest way to find the geoordinates for a building is to search for the place with Google Maps, click What’s Here to reveal details of the map point, and then click the coordinates. Google Maps then displays the detail in a pane (Figure 2). Replace the comma in the coordinates with a semi-colon to make the data suitable for input to Set-Place.

Finding Geocoordinates in Google Maps
Figure 2: Finding Geocoordinates in Google Maps

Client Use of Geocoordinates

At present, OWA and Outlook mobile are the only clients to use the geocoordinates for rooms. OWA displays maps when scheduling new meetings or displaying meeting information (Figure 1) together with a Directions link. Clicking the link feeds the longitude and latitude information in the room geocoordinates to the Bing Locations API to find and display directions to the room with Bing Maps. You can’t configure OWA to use a different maps provider.

Outlook Mobile displays map information when scheduling a new meeting (Figure 3) but doesn’t when viewing meetings in the calendar.

Outlook Mobile (for iOS) displays map information when scheduling a new meeting
Figure 3: Outlook Mobile (for iOS) displays place information when scheduling a new meeting

For more information about room mailboxes, read the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

60 Replies to “Populating Location Data for the Outlook Places Service”

  1. Pingback: Populating Locations for the Outlook Places Service – 365ForAll

  2. Hi Tony, do you have any pointers on the “IsManaged” and “BookingType” properties. Both are null for me on all of my resource mailboxes.

    Reply

      1. According to Microsoft:
        IsManaged means the room is managed by a delegate. This can only be set to True if the ResourceDelegate property has a smtp address.
        BookingType can be standard or managed. Standard means it can be booked as normal while managed means the request must be approved by a delegate.

    2. Hi,

      I have an issue on my tenant, some room mailbox doesn’t display correct availability and when i check get-place on one of them, i see no information about -BookingType and Ismanaged, do you know how to fix this ?

      Reply

      1. File a support incident with Microsoft. They can look at your tenant and see what settings exist. I can’t. Guesswork is seldom a good basis for resolving computer issues.

      2. Support ticket is open for a month and no solution for now.
        Seems they don’t understand the issue but i see comments about empty parameter very strange, maybe time zone issue but i checked everything … do you thing there is a forum to help me instead of Microsoft.

  3. Hi Tony, if you pipe Get-Place to a Format-List, there’s a property called ‘Tags.’ Any insight on the purpose of this property or where it might surface for end users? I see it included in the documentation on the cmdlets, but not finding any information on what it’s for. Thanks!

    Reply

    1. Tags are for descriptive terms that you want to associate with a place, like “Amazing Views”

      Reply

      1. Thanks for the response! I suspected as much based on the documentation, but I am not seeing where this information surfaces for users. I set a couple of tags on a place, but I don’t see it on the card. Have you seen this work?

      2. I have,. I believe they are surfaced when someone views an appointment that has a location specified in OWA. Try it.

  4. Hi Tony,
    thanks for the amazing overview. I was interested in the room features. Unfortunately i wasn’t able go get any information about this. Is this an Exchange Online feature or is this something that works on Exchange 2016 too?
    Thanks in advance!

    Reply

      1. Hi Tony, we already use the room mailboxes. But i was interested in the features of the very first screenshot where PolyCom, InFocus WXGA Projector and Samsung Monitor is displayed. This is a huge benefit if a new colleagues joins the company and is unsure which meeting room to choose.
        Thanks so much for this article by the way!

      2. Keep an eye on this space. I suspect that the Outlook folks will improve and refine the Places service over the next few months.

      3. And BTW, the properties of the conference room illustrated in the screenshot include:

        AudioDeviceName : PolyCom
        VideoDeviceName : InFocus WXGA Projector
        DisplayDeviceName : Samsung OLED 55″

  5. I we’d like to add amenities like Whiteboards, should we use this in combination with Set-ResourceConfig -ResourcePropertySchema “Room/Whiteboard”? How will it work together and show up for the end user?

    Reply

    1. That resource schema is for room mailboxes. I am not sure that it carries forward to the Place service. But give it a try…

      Reply

  6. Tony thanks for the information. A question, an issue i’m seeing is that the suggestions of a room contains incorrect capacity amount. But when i do a get-place for that room it shows the correct place. Also if i don’t use suggestions and just click on rooms it also shows the right amount 😐

    Reply

  7. Going down the road for Exchange Online, do you think they will stop using the good old Room Lists and move to using just attributes set by Set-Place instead? At least once all the clients actually use the Set-Place attributes. Although I guess we will only see Set-Place for cloud 🙂

    Reply

    1. Too much speculation… Ask the question to the engineers at the Virtual Ignite conference!

      Reply

  8. Hi all, great information. Im having a hard time adding the geocoordinates. We are in a hybrid environment so i try adding the coordinats on the on-prem server and sync them to Exchange online. The only way i am able to enter the coordinates is by using comma and not dots between the numbers in long and lat. Had any issues with that ? Set-Place -Identity “room” -GeoCoordinates “59,875431;10,50351” In the documentation it stats that we should use . and not , ?

    Reply

    1. Anytime I see issues with commas and dots I think localization. I tested with my PC configured for English. Maybe you were using a different language?

      Reply

    2. According to other blog posts and personal experience, do use EITHER GeoCoordinates OR Street/City!
      Using both seems to confuse it and brings less than optimal results.
      Also pls note, that only a small subset of parameters of Set-Place is supported for onprem room mailboxes.

      Reply

  9. Hi again. FYI: In our hybrid environments we have been successfully in setting the geocoordinates on our meeting rooms. BUT the attributes msDS-GeoCoordinatesLatitude and msDS-GeoCoordinatesLongitude those attributes are not synced with Azure AD connect at this time! We have this confirmed with Microsoft support now, unfortunately.

    Reply

      1. Hi Dipesh
        We have not been able to accomplish this task. In the Azure AD connect service we should be able to activate sync of the necessary AD attributes, but I’m not sure this is a supported method. If Microsoft support does not support this then we wont do the sync. It would be nice to have this information thow in AD/Azure AD.

  10. Hi Tony. Great article, just a quick question. It seems the -Floor attribute only takes numbers starting from 1 onwards. We have lots of rooms on the ground floor and in the UK our room names start G-01 (as in ground floor, meeting room 01. Do you know if Microsoft can make it so it supports a ‘0’?

    Reply

    1. If you want Microsoft to make a change, you should file a support incident so that the engineers hear about the issue. Data drives decisions about what features are implemented…

      Reply
  11. Pingback: Outlook Places Become Important to More than OWA
  12. Pingback: How to Block Room Bookings with Exchange Online - Office 365 for IT Pros

  13. Hi Tony

    I made a test room with the geolocations etc. set. In OWA I can see the map being displayed and all the correct information that was set. But in outlook mobile for iOS and Android I don’t see a map, on iOS I see the street name and such but no map is being displayed and on Android I don’t even see the street address. This all cloud. Not sure why it’s behaving like this, I see a map if I select a location and not a room.

    Reply

    1. Sounds like something is not quite right with your data. I’ve found Places to be very particular about format and content. You could ask Microsoft support to have a look. They can see your data while I can’t.

      Reply

  14. Hi Tony

    So after being in contact with Microsoft support, and I reference this blog post they sent me to outlook mobile app support. The mobile app support then states that this feature is not something they have and they close my ticket. I made a new ticket same information and they seem to be confusing this with indoor maps even if i show the screenshots etc, Can you confirm that this feature is working in outlook mobile app?

    Reply

    1. I just tested this feature here. Everything works as expected with OWA, but the feature isn’t working with Outlook mobile. This isn’t altogether surprising because Microsoft withdraws features quite often to make adjustments etc. Things worked in January and the engineers I interacted with confirmed it as such, but the implementation in Outlook mobile wasn’t as smooth as OWA, and this might be why they withdrew the feature to improve it. I’ll ask some of my contacts…

      Reply

  15. As mention above from Hans, the geo-coordinates is not synced from AD to AAD. But one question, is it possible to migrate room to be in cloud only?

    Reply

    1. I think you need to remove the room mailbox from on-premises and recreate it in the cloud. However, I don’t have a hybrid setup available to test if another method is possible.

      Reply

  16. Hi Tony,
    Any idea on how often the places services updates changes that are made through the cmdlets?

    Reply

    1. The places service updates VERY slowly! Pls give it at least 24 hours to show up in Outlook. So, it will show up for users but do not expect to see your changes “today”

      Reply

  17. Hi Tony,
    I followed the MS instructions and within room finder, I now see my test workspace. It shows up when I change the Type dropdown to workspace.
    The building selector is still blank. I checked that it was filled in as metadata for the workspace. We are hybrid and the City attribute may not be there.
    Do you have any instructions/resources on getting the building dropdown to populate?
    Thanks.

    Reply

  18. Large meeting rooms are booked for meetings by One or 2 partipants. We would like to keep the processing as Standard itself but would like to block meeings where members are less than the minimum number. Any chance?

    Reply

  19. Hi, I get an error when executing Get-Place, Set-Place. A while ago, everything worked:

    PS C:\Users\xxxxxxxxxx> Get-Place -Identity “TOKIO – 12 OS.” | FL
    Encountered an internal server error.
    + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-Place], TaskException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : [Server=DB7PR04MB4058,RequestId=036489b1-8e20-49f4-899d-0cfab43ddb20,TimeStamp=01.06.2022 13:55:31] [FailureCategory=Cmdlet-TaskException] D842ECFA,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Recipi
    entTasks.GetPlace
    + PSComputerName : outlook.office365.com

    Reply

    1. Sorry to say, but it is not uncommon to get TaskExceptions from the places service.
      I have no idea, what is going on, but during the last weeks, there were days where every set-place commands returned a task exception. Some days, only certain parameter did not work like “-city” , etc..
      That now even GET-place returns an error is new.

      Reply

  20. Hello,

    I have noticed that the Geo Coordinates and the descriptions of the devices in the rooms are not displaying in Outlook desktop application, Outlook mobile app and the old outlook version of MacOS.

    It’s only showing in OWA and the new Outlook version on Mac. Could this be a bug or is this something that may not be supported?

    Thanks

    Reply

    1. I think it will be supported in Outlook desktop, but when is the question. Right now, the component is built for OWA, and the direction is to reuse these components on other platforms. We might have to wait for the Outlook Monarch release before you see this for Windows, and then for Mac.

      Reply

  21. Hi Tony, Can you write an article on -BookingType parameter? How to use it This parameter shows up in set-calendarprrocessing as well as set-place, and I don’t think it works as expected and as described in the MS documentation. When i run Set-Place with -bookingtype reserved, it goes back to standard on its own

    Reply

  22. Trying to figure out how to remove specific data we entered in the -tags parameter
    neither $null or blank is removing our stale data
    Suggestions?

    Reply

    1. I’d file a support incident with Microsoft. First, I don’t have access to your data so it’s impossible for me to replicate your problem. Second, if a problem exists, logging it formally will bring the issue to the attention of Microsoft engineering.

      Reply

    2. Just to be clear: You do realize, that updates to the Places service can take up to 48 hours to end up at the user’s screen?!
      I have yet to see any other MSFT service, which takes so long to see the results.
      That being said, there are some strange issues in this service in general. For unknown reasons, the -mtrenabled parameter does not show any effect on one of my test tenants. Never found out why yet.

      Reply

  23. Seems like there is room for improvement, when it comes to GeoLocation.
    In denmark this does not work. Now have a tried with to large cities (Odense, Copenhagen), and both experience error similar to below.

    Set-place -Identity “UPN” -GeoCoordinates “55.6822163;12.5515606”

    Cannot process argument transformation on parameter ‘GeoCoordinates’. Cannot convert value “55.6822163,12.5515606” to type “Microsoft.Exchange.Data.GeoCoordinates”. Error: “The geocoordinates in ‘55.6822163,12.5515606’ has an invalid
    format. You must specify either “latitude;longitude” or “latitude;longitude;altitude”. Example: “47.643546;-122.12316” or “47.643546;-122.12316;4385.732″.”

    Reply

    1. Interesting:
      1. Did you try to enter with less digits? 55.6822163 is quite a mouthful, how about 55.68221? that should be good enough.
      2. Do you try to enter the GeoCoord. in ADDITION to city, street, etc. or INSTEAD?
      In my experiments (quite a few months ago) it did not like it, when I entered both infos. Means, if you use GeoCoord, make sure, that the address fields are empty.

      Reply

      1. Thanks for your feedback Harald.

        1. I have tried to shorten the coordinates, but the result are the same (-GeoCoordinates “55.68221;12.55156”)
        2. Yes I try to apply as addition to city, as I also want the users to see the city in Outlook.

        Not sure this is useful, if City cannot be present at same time. I will test that on a CDX tenant.

      2. Why shouldn’t it be useful? Or phrased differently. The only point in entering GeoCoord is to specify a location, which is not “map-able”. lLike a huge automobile factory, which is located at “Toyota Drive 1” but spread over a huge area without any official street names to map them.
        ALSO did you know, that ROOMLISTS can also have GeoCoord. Although the docs are pretty much non-existing, chances are, that the room finder is (also?) using this information. After all afaik the map is shown after you pick a roomLIST and before you choose an individual room. Know where I am going with this??
        Keen to hear from your experiments but pls be patient. It takes min. 24 hours until any changes are being shown in outlook.

    2. I have the same problem in Belgium. If you enter the coordinates without zero digits after the “;” it works. But of course the location is then not correct. So I can decide it is something with location or culture-info, decimal seperator.
      Do you have already a solution for this issue?

      Reply

    3. I asked Microsoft if there was a problem entering geocoordinates for use by the Outlook Places service. They were slow to respond, but said that there had been a problem that is now fixed. Is anyone having an issue with geocoordinates now?

      Reply

  24. Set-Place -Identity “RoomName” -GeoCoordinates “XX,051396, X,716899”
    If we want to set the coordinates in Powershell on a roommailbox with the above command we get following error. Anybody knows how to solve this? I guess it’s something with set-culture nl-BE, decimal point,…

    Write-ErrorMessage : Cannot process argument transformation on parameter ‘GeoCoordinates’. Cannot convert value “XX,051396, X,716899” to type “Microsoft.Exchange.Data.GeoCoordinates”. Error
    : “The geocoordinates in ‘XX,051396, X,716899’ has an invalid format. You must specify either “latitude;longitude” or “latitude;longitude;altitude”. Example: “47.643546;-122.12316” or “47.6
    43546;-122.12316;4385.732″.”

    We’v already changed cultureClass to nl-BE, set decimal point instead of , – changed the “,” betweel latitude & longitude into “;”

    Reply

    1. Hell Sven.
      The “;” between the parameters have nothing to do with culture = decimal point. Using a “,” for a delimiter is for sure wrong.
      However you seem to be onto something with your other comment regarding the digit “0” causing problems. This is very strange indeed…

      Reply

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