Microsoft Places and Desk Booking Implementation

Microsoft's workplace app for hybrid offices, built into Microsoft 365: desk and room booking from a floor-plan map in Teams and Outlook (Places Finder), visibility into which days colleagues plan to be in the office, an Explorer view for coordinating in-office days, and occupancy insights for the people who run the building. It works with the room mailboxes and calendars you already have, which is why implementation is measured in days, not months.

Places enablement and configuration in your tenant, the buildings/floors/sections directory, uploaded and calibrated floor-plan maps, bookable desks and desk pools created with the right modes and metadata, your existing rooms linked onto the same map, a licensing guidance memo, admin and champions enablement, and a rollout communications kit — fixed at $1,950 and delivered in 1 week for a single office location.

As of Microsoft's April 1, 2026 licensing change — generally no. Core Places features, including Places Finder and Places Explorer, are now included for licensed Microsoft 365 users. The advanced capabilities that used to sit in per-user Teams Premium — advance desk booking from the map, desk check-in, auto-release, and space analytics — are instead licensed per space with the Microsoft Teams Shared Space license, so you license the forty desks people book, not the four hundred employees who book them. If you bought Teams Premium before the change, Microsoft's transition terms keep its Places features until your renewal. We verify the current rules at kickoff and give you exact counts.

It is Microsoft's per-space license (the successor to the Teams Shared Devices license) that unlocks advance booking, check-in, auto-release, and utilization analytics for the physical spaces you assign it to, with a single license covering a small bundle of desks under Microsoft's current terms. How many you need is a function of your floor plan and which desks you want advance-bookable versus drop-in — producing that exact count is part of scoping, and we can supply the licenses through our direct Microsoft CSP relationship.

No, and that is why half-done Places rollouts stall. Desks and desk pools are real directory objects — desk pools are Exchange Online workspace mailboxes — created and configured through the Microsoft Places PowerShell module and admin tooling, placed into a strict building/floor/section hierarchy, positioned on the calibrated map, and given a mode: reservable (book in advance), drop-in, assigned to a person, or unavailable. We build all of that, and then show your admins how to change it.

Individual desks give a better booking experience, richer analytics, and finer management, and Microsoft's own guidance leans that way; pools are quicker to stand up and fine for genuinely interchangeable seating like touchdown benches. Most offices end up with a mix — named bookable desks for the neighborhoods people care about, pools for overflow — and we implement the mix your layout calls for.

Your existing room mailboxes are linked into the Places structure so rooms appear on the same floor map as desks and stay bookable exactly as before — that linkage is in scope. What this engagement does not do is deploy Teams Rooms hardware into those rooms; that is our separate Microsoft Teams Rooms Design and Deployment service, and running the two together is the natural way to modernize an office in one pass.

Not within this engagement — badge and sensor integrations depend heavily on which systems you run and are quoted separately as time and materials if you want them explored. Worth knowing: most organizations formalizing hot-desking get what they need from booking and check-in data alone, without sensor hardware.

It gives you decision-grade signals: bookings, check-ins, auto-released no-shows, and utilization patterns for licensed spaces. That is booking behavior, not a body count — Places is not a surveillance system, and colleague-location features show only what each person chooses to share. In practice, booking data answers the questions that matter: which days are full, which floors are dead, and whether the desk ratio is wrong.

Yes, for a single office location with floor plans and desk decisions ready at kickoff — the directory, maps, desks, linkage, validation, and enablement fit comfortably in five working days because Places builds on Exchange and Teams infrastructure you already run. What moves the date is almost always a missing floor plan or an undecided seating chart, which is why those are named prerequisites.

A fixed $1,950 per project, quoted in writing before work begins; you pay after you approve delivery. The fee never includes Microsoft's charges — Teams Shared Space licenses and your Microsoft 365 subscriptions are billed by Microsoft or through your CSP agreement — and additional buildings beyond the agreed site are quoted separately. If you are unsure whether your current licensing already covers what you want, our Microsoft 365 License Audit and Optimization service answers that across the whole tenant, not just Places.

Your admins are enabled to run Places day to day — adding desks, changing modes, reading the data — and your champions have the rollout kit to drive adoption. If you would rather not own the administration, our Microsoft Teams Administrator on Demand service can carry it, and the Managed Microsoft Teams Rooms Service keeps the meeting-room fleet on the same map healthy month to month.