Where is the new Room Finder on Outlook Desktop?

Posted in : Office 365 By Jonas Back Translate with Google ⟶

3 years ago

IT- and Exchange admins responsible for managing Room mailboxes in Exchange Online has been struggling to understand WHY Microsoft has developed a new Room Finder in Outlook on the Web but kept the old booking experience in Outlook Desktop:

The main reason IT admins gets confused is because the legacy way used special Room Lists groups and Room Finder requires additional configuration using cmdlet Set-Place. But still, several years, the Outlook Desktop has never gotten the new Room Finder booking experience.

Turns out, they were thinking bigger than that – introducing WebView2 which basically ”embeds” some Outlook on the Web features within parts of Outlook Desktop:

That means the development team only has to write code for the component and re-use it on multiple platforms. They can also bring new features to that specific part of the app without waiting for a full Office Desktop release. But that also brings some questions like if this requires and uses the locally Edge web browser for these parts? What would then happen if you had a client where this web browser is not installed or have an older version?

Well, in short they don’t require or use the web browser components but rather a Runtime that the developer can deploy with the application. It’s also separately installed and updated silently which makes it more evergreen.

Of course, this brings some complexity to offline scenarios and if you want to know more, I suggest the following video explaining how it works and different deploy to production scenarios:

But in short, this feature is said to bring the new Room Finder experience to Outlook Desktop on Windows in April 2021 and for normal online Windows 10 always updated clients it seems the only thing we as admins needs to do is sit and wait and wait for Microsoft to deploy it.

Tags : Outlook