Microsoft Places
Latest Microsoft Places Changes
What’s Changed Recently?
Microsoft Places is evolving rapidly and there seems to be new features coming out each week.
In this post we will aim to keep you up to speed with the most recent changes.
New Section Grouping that Impacts How you Define Your Desks
A recent update to Places now requires all desks and workspaces in Microsoft Places must be linked to a section.
- Buildings now contain floors
- Floors contain sections
- Sections house workspaces and desks.
This restructuring has meant reconfiguring existing setups to align with the updated format.
Rooms can be optionally parented to a section or linked directly to a floor.
Our take on the rationale for introducing this new section grouping is discussed in this video.
What Changed Previously?
A New Desk Resource Mailbox
As of mid-November 2024, there is now a new resource type of ‘Desk’ available to Microsoft Places which is used to represent an individual desk.
Previously if you wanted to set up a single, bookable desk you had two options:
- Use an equipment mailbox
- Use the newer workspace mailbox with a capacity set to ‘1’
The new Desk Mailbox is reserved for Microsoft Places only.
I did some further digging into this new desk mailbox:
A mailbox configured as a type ‘Desk’ operates much like an equipment mailbox. It responds to requests automatically if it is booked using its email address.
You can run Set-CalendarProcessing to configure its booking policy, the same way as any other resource mailbox. Like an equipment mailbox, it does not have any Place information, and if you try to configure a location using a Set-Place command, it fails.
To make it work with Places Finder, we need to run New-Place to create it, add it to its parent section and link it to the mailbox.
An example PowerShell command is as follows (note ParentId is the Places Id of the relevant Section).
New-Place -Name 'Desk101' -Type Desk -ParentId 4a19fb1c-46de-49a3-922d-daefbce0677c -Mailbox "Desk101"
