Microsoft Places: The IT Manager’s Complete Guide (2026)

Microsoft Places: The IT Manager’s Complete Guide (2026)

Microsoft Places is now available to far more organisations than it was six months ago. On April 1, 2026, Microsoft restructured the licensing for Places and Microsoft Teams, moving core workplace coordination features out from behind the Teams Premium paywall and into standard Microsoft 365 plans. If you haven’t looked at Places recently, now is the time.

This guide covers what Microsoft Places actually does, what changed in the April 2026 licensing update, and how to decide whether it’s worth rolling out to your organisation.

Microsoft Places workspace dashboard showing room and desk booking

What is Microsoft Places?

Microsoft Places is a workplace coordination app built on top of Microsoft 365 and Teams. It helps employees plan their office days, book desks and meeting rooms, and see where colleagues are sitting. For IT and facilities teams, it provides occupancy data and space utilisation analytics.

Places sits inside Microsoft Teams and Outlook, so there is no separate application to install or manage. That’s its biggest selling point: if your organisation already runs Microsoft 365, Places adds workplace intelligence without adding another platform to your stack.

Core features

  • Places Finder: Employees search for and book rooms using detailed listings, including photos, floor plans, capacity, and available equipment.
  • Places Explorer: A map-based view of every workplace, showing available desks, rooms, and where colleagues plan to sit on a given day.
  • Occupancy insights: Aggregated, privacy-safe data on how spaces are actually being used, surfaced in the Places admin dashboard.
  • Work location sharing: Employees publish their intended location (office, remote, travel) so colleagues can coordinate in-person days.
  • Desk booking: Reserve desks directly from Teams or Outlook, with support for neighbourhoods and team zones.
Employee booking a desk using Microsoft Teams on laptop

The April 2026 Licensing Changes Explained

Before April 1, 2026, most Places features required a Teams Premium licence on top of a standard Microsoft 365 plan. That changed significantly with the spring 2026 licensing update.

What’s now included in standard Microsoft 365

Places Finder is now available without Teams Premium. Any user with a Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise licence can search for and book meeting rooms using Places, including the detailed room profiles with images and floor plans.

Places Explorer, the map-based space browser, is now accessible through the Places app inside Outlook and Teams for standard licence holders.

Work location sharing and colleague location visibility are also available in standard plans.

What still requires premium licences

AI-driven features require additional licensing. Copilot room booking, which allows employees to use natural language to find and book rooms via Microsoft 365 Copilot, requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence (currently priced at $30/user/month, check Microsoft’s pricing page for current rates).

Advanced analytics and custom reporting features remain behind premium tiers.

The new Teams Shared Space licence

Microsoft replaced the old Teams Shared Devices licence with a new Teams Shared Space licence, designed specifically for desk-sharing environments. One licence supports up to four shared desks, making it a more cost-effective way to add booking hardware to a hot-desk floor. This licence supports desk booking hardware (panels and displays) as well as Surface Hub and Teams Rooms scenarios.

How Microsoft Places Compares to Dedicated Desk Booking Tools

The April 2026 changes make Places competitive for organisations already running Microsoft 365. But it is worth being clear about where it excels and where it falls short compared to dedicated workplace management platforms like Robin, Condeco, or Joan.

Where Places wins

  • Zero extra licensing cost for core features if you’re already on Microsoft 365.
  • Native Teams and Outlook integration, no employee behaviour change required. Booking happens inside tools they already use daily.
  • Microsoft Entra identity integration, single sign-on, directory sync, and access policies are all native.
  • Privacy by design, occupancy data is aggregated and does not expose individual location to non-authorised users.

Where Places falls short

  • Hardware ecosystem is limited. Places works with Microsoft-certified Teams Rooms hardware and panels, but does not natively integrate with third-party room displays like Joan or Evoko.
  • Visitor management is absent. If you need to manage guest check-in, badge printing, or pre-registration, you’ll need a separate tool.
  • Reporting depth. Occupancy analytics are functional but less granular than what you get from dedicated IWMS platforms.
  • No parking or asset booking. If you need to book car parking spaces or shared equipment, Places does not cover that.
Smart room booking panel outside a glass-walled meeting room

Setting Up Microsoft Places: What IT Needs to Do

Enabling Places for your organisation involves several steps in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.

1. Enable Places in the Teams admin centre

Navigate to Teams admin centre, then Workplace, then Places settings. Toggle Places on for your organisation. You can scope the rollout to specific groups during piloting.

2. Configure buildings and floors

Places uses building and floor data from the Microsoft 365 admin centre under Buildings. You’ll need to create building records, upload floor plans in SVG format, and assign rooms and desks to the correct floor and section. This is the most time-consuming part of the initial setup.

3. Import room and desk data

Meeting rooms are pulled from Exchange room mailboxes. If your rooms are already configured in Exchange with accurate capacity and equipment attributes, they’ll appear automatically in Places. Desks require a separate configuration using desk plans in the admin centre or via PowerShell for bulk imports.

4. Deploy the Places app to users

Places is available as a Teams app and can be pinned to the Teams sidebar via app setup policies in the Teams admin centre. Pin it for all users or for pilot groups first.

5. Configure work location policies

Decide whether work location sharing is opt-in or enabled by default. This is a privacy-sensitive decision worth consulting your HR and legal teams on before enabling organisation-wide.

Is Microsoft Places Worth Deploying in 2026?

For Microsoft 365 shops with hybrid teams and hot-desking floors, the answer is yes, especially now that core features are included in standard licencing. The incremental cost is zero, the integration is seamless, and the employee experience is genuinely good because it lives inside Teams and Outlook.

The caveats: if you need deep analytics, visitor management, hardware-agnostic room panels, or multi-system integration (for example, tying room booking into a building management system), you will hit Places’ limits quickly. In those cases, a dedicated IWMS or room booking platform is the better investment, and Places can still run alongside it for the Teams booking experience.

For organisations evaluating room booking hardware, note that Microsoft-certified Teams Rooms panels give the tightest Places integration. See our guide to the best room booking systems for offices in 2026 for a comparison of hardware options including Joan, Logitech Tap Scheduler, and Evoko.

Bottom Line

Microsoft Places is no longer a premium add-on that most IT teams can ignore. The April 2026 licensing changes bring genuine room and desk booking into standard Microsoft 365 at no extra cost. If you run a Microsoft 365 environment and haven’t evaluated Places yet, dedicate a half-day to a proof of concept. The setup overhead is front-loaded but manageable, and the employee experience payoff for hybrid teams is real.