Add Surface Hub and SRS Rooms to Microsoft Teams Meetings

(Or any room, as a matter of fact)

 

If you’re using Outlook and have the Teams Meeting add-on, you can schedule a Teams meeting and add a room to the meeting:

 

 

But if you try to schedule a meeting from Teams and look for a room to find its availability, you might face a challenge as Teams would not show any rooms:

 

Looking at the glass half full, this is a great opportunity to make some order in how users book rooms with Teams:

Teams takes advantage of Exchange’s New-DistributionGroup cmdlet -RoomList switch. The RoomList switch specifies that all members of a specific distribution group are room mailboxes.

You can create as many distribution groups as you need – based on any parameter that you want. In my scenario, I chose to create two lists:

• One for rooms equipped with Surface Hubs
• One for rooms equipped with Skype Room Systems.

This way my users will know which collaboration devices are available for them when they book a room.

Creation process of the distribution groups is easy.

Connect to Exchange Online:

$365Cred = Get-Credential
$365Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell -Credential $365Cred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection
$ImportResults = Import-PSSession $365Session

Create the new distributiobn groups with the -RoomList switch:

New-DistributionGroup -Name “Surface Hubs” -Roomlist

Add rooms to the distribution groups:

Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity “Surface Hubs” -Member “SurfaceHub01"

Log back into your Teams client and see the new lists:

 

Choose the available room from the list:

 

 

And you’re all done:

 

The room is now booked. If you’re using a Surface Hub or a Skype Room System the meeting will be displayed on the device.

---

This post was originally posted on my TechNet blog: https://aka.ms/y0av.