This appears to be a "known" issue, but apparently no fix for it. However, I've been impressed before at the tenacity of the experts here to figure out an answer/fix.
ISSUE
When booking a New Meeting in Outlook (2013 or 2010) and choosing the Rooms
button:
The default list that opens is the Offline Global Address List
:
Which means a user has to change from the Offline Global Address List
to the All Rooms
list as shown here in order to easily pick from the list of actual rooms/resources:
This isn't the default however for On-Premise Exchange servers. They default "correctly" to the All Rooms
list when you click the Rooms
button in the meeting request.
While the option of using the Room Finder
is there and does work, users have to know to click the Room Finder
choice and it doesn't fix the actual root issue here.
MY RESEARCH
A few links I've found:
http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/158/t/41013.aspx
http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/148/p/24139/113954.aspx
http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/172/t/58824.aspx
It was suggested that it might be that the "msExchResourceAddressLists attribute has incorrect value set". I checked my config by running:
Get-OrganizationConfig | Select-Object ResourceAddressLists
and the output was what it should be:
ResourceAddressLists
--------------------
{\All Rooms}
QUESTION
Does anyone have a fix that will make the All Rooms
list be the default list when clicking the Rooms
button in Outlook when using Office 365 / Exchange Online?
Best Answer
I just recently discovered Room List Distribution Groups, which provide a much more functional method for reserving rooms using the Outlook Room Finder.
Have you tried using this, and seeing if it also resolves the problem you are having with selecting the wrong address book?
To set up a room list for all room mailboxes on your site, you use the Powershell commands
Once you've set up a room list, it is visible in Outlook when making a new Meeting request. The nice feature of this is that it will only display the available rooms for the date/time of the meeting.
This is the resource I used for accomplishing it with Office 365, but the Powershell commands and end-user experience are the same in on-premises at least back to Exchange 2010.