(Updated) Microsoft Teams: Ad-hoc individual desk booking in Teams

Microsoft Teams will soon support ad-hoc individual desk booking, allowing users to automatically book desks by plugging into shared peripherals. This feature, available for Teams desktop on Windows and Mac with a Teams Premium license, will roll out from late April to mid-May 2025. Automatic peripheral association will follow in June 2025. Admins must configure individual desks in Exchange and associate peripherals in the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal.

Updated May 19, 2025: We have updated the content. Thank you for your patience.

Before this rollout, the Microsoft Teams bookable desk capabilities supported booking at a desk pool level (also known as workspaces in Microsoft Exchange). After this rollout, users can automatically book individual desks when they plug in to a shared desk peripheral. This rollout will also support other scenarios for individual desks, such as confirming a reservation if a user has booked in advance and notifying a user that a space is reserved for someone else. #MicrosoftPlaces

This experience relies on the peripherals that the user plugs into at the desk being associated to the individual desk account in the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal. In addition to the roll out of individual desk booking, the Pro Management portal will soon use desk booking data to intelligently associate peripherals to individual desks, automatically creating inventory relationships for you. The association logic relies on many unique users booking the same desk and plugging into the same peripherals, as identified by the serial number, product ID, and vendor ID. Auto association can keep up with any changes to inventory by re-associating a peripheral if it is moved to a different desk.

This feature is available for Teams desktop on Windows and Mac and requires a Teams Premium license. 

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 473570.

[When this will happen:]

General Availability (Worldwide): We will begin rolling out late April 2025 (previously early April) and expect to complete by mid-May 2025 (previously mid-April).

General Availability (Worldwide) for automatic association of peripherals: We will begin rolling out early June 2025 and expect to be complete by mid-June 2025. 

[How this will affect your organization:]

This feature will be available by default for admins to configure. To use this feature, admins must first set up individual desks in Exchange in their tenant. Please follow the instructions in Configure desks for individual booking.

Once the individual desks have been created, admins must associate the peripherals to the individual desk account in Teams Rooms Pro Management portal. Learn more at Setting up Bookable Desks in Microsoft Teams.

Shared peripherals (peripherals used by multiple users in the office) may also be automatically associated, removing the manual association step for admins.

Note that the automatic peripheral association process relies on bookings and peripheral plug-ins, so it may take some time. You will also be able to:

• Configure the threshold of users who need to report a peripheral-desk pairing in order to auto-associate. A higher threshold may lead to more accuracy but will also slow down the time to associate. 
• Independently mark auto-associated desks as verified if you choose to check for accuracy. This is not required. 
• Enable / turn off auto-association for specific desks or for your entire tenant 

After the peripheral is associated to the individual desk account either by the admin or automatically, these user experiences will automatically kick in after 24 hours:

• If the desk is free and a user did not book the desk in advance, after plugging into a shared desk peripheral, the desk will be reserved automatically for the user.
• If a user booked the desk in advance, after plugging in, the user will receive a message confirming the reservation.
• If a desk is already reserved for someone else, a user who plugs in will receive a notification that the desk is reserved for someone else.

Like with desk pools, if a tenant and user has opted-into automatic work location updates, a user’s work location will also be automatically updated to a specific building upon plug-in to an individual desk. Learn more at Setting up Bookable Desks in Microsoft Teams.

Admins will be able to view analytics for individual desks such as reservations, occupancy, and more, like they can for desk pools. If an individual desk has an associated peripheral, it will appear under Reports > Desks usage in the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal for admins to review. This report will be in preview until July 2025 with no license enforcement. License requirements will be released closer to the enforcement date.

[What you need to do to prepare:]

This rollout will happen automatically by the specified date with no admin action required before the rollout. You may want to notify your team about this change and update any relevant documentation.

Learn more

• Setting up Bookable Desks in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn (will be updated before rollout begins)
• First things to know about bookable desks in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Support