Set up Google Calendar room booking suggestions

Help meeting organizers book courtesy rooms and resources for guests in any location.

With automatic room suggestions, Calendar checks the work location of everyone invited to the meeting. In the Rooms tab, Calendar intelligently shows the best rooms closest to each guest. It takes into account each person's building and floor location, previous booking history, audio and video equipment use, and capacity needs.

Key things to know

Automatic room suggestion works best when you take both of these actions:

Add the work location for all users—If a user doesn't have a main work location set, Calendar doesn’t consider them in room suggestions. This means the suggested room may be too small, or a room in the building may not be suggested altogether.
Use a structured format for rooms—Only room information that's structured is used by Calendar for automatic room suggestions. Calendar makes intelligent decisions based on the details for each room.
For details on structuring resources, see Impact of adopting structured resources and Switch to structured resources.

Additional details

When adding a room to an event, location-based or frequently-used room suggestions may appear.

Location-based suggestions appear when you add a room to an event if the location of at least one attendee is known. See Add a room to an event.
- The location can be specified by setting a main office building or working location. See Set your default working location.
- Working location must be turned on by an administrator. See Turn working location on or off for users.
- Location-based suggestions only appear when a user’s location is for a building with structured rooms, and the user has not responded to the event as “joining virtually” or not joining.
Frequently-used suggestions appear if the person who is adding the room doesn’t have a set location. These suggestions are based on the person's usage and are visible only to that user.

Add main work location

There are 2 ways to add the main work location. You can do it for your users or have them add it themselves.

Help deciding on user vs. admin setup

Every work environment is different. Think about the aspects of each setup to know what's best for your company.

Admin setup

User setup

User work location data is known, up to date, and accurate.

Benefits

Ensures user data in Google is synced with your own data
Avoids user error

Method

API (building, floor, floor section, desk)
GCDS (building, floor)

User experience

View-only work location

You don’t have or are uncertain about the user work location data in your organization.

Benefits

Fast 1-click setup
Calendar notifications for users to add and update location data
Less work for the admin

Method

Initial setup from the Google Admin console
Work location data (building, floor) updated by users themselves

User experience

User control over both viewing and updating work location
User's work location inferred and sometimes set by Google
User prompted by Google to make updates

Add location as an admin

If you choose to set the main work location for your users, use API or Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS).

Use Google Cloud Directory Sync

Use GCDS adding the user work location in any of the following cases:

There are many users and user locations.
You have continuous changes and updates to user locations.
GCDS is already being used to sync user profiles from Microsoft Active Directory to Google Accounts.

In the GCDS Configuration Manager on the User Profile Attributes tab, map these work location fields to where you store building and floor information today:

Building ID
Floor Name

Syncing these fields is optional. Make sure the building IDs match the building ID that you created in building management.

For details, see About Google Cloud Directory Sync.

Use API

Use an API for adding the user work location in any of the following cases:

There are many users and user locations.
You already have a system where user locations are called via API.
Changes and updates to user locations occur regularly.
You want an automated way to keep user locations synchronized.
There are values for floor section and desk codes.

For details, see Google Workspace Admin SDK Guide for Users.

It may take up to 24 hours for the formatted user location information to propagate and be visible in a user’s profile.

Use these properties when you set up your API:

Property name	Description	Example
type (string)*	The location type: CUSTOM, DEFAULT, DESK Note: The type must be set to DESK to update a user’s main work location	DESK
customType (string)	If the type is CUSTOM, this field includes the custom value	free_text
area (string)*	Textual location is most useful for display purposes to concisely describe the location. For example, "Mountain View, CA", or "Near Palo Alto"	Mountain View, CA
buildingId (string)*	Building identifier has to exactly match the buildingId that you created for the building Reserved value strings: Indicate that a user doesn't have an office building. For example, if a user is working remotely, use $$NO_BUILDING$$ To indicate that the building hasn't been created yet in the building resources, use $$MISSING_BUILDING$$	NYC
floorName (string)	Floor identifier has to exactly match a floor defined within the buildingId. Note: A floor name without a defined building Id is invalid	Lobby, Mezzanine, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5M, 6
floorSection (string)	Indication of where on a floor the user sits	A, South wing
deskCode (string)*	Indication of exact desk location	Pod 17, 13-A

* Required

Let users add the location

Turn on Calendar prompts to help users add their primary work location.

Sign in to your Google Admin console.
Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).
In the Admin console, go to Menu DirectoryDirectory settings.
Click Profile editing.
In the left panel under Organizational Unit, select the organization where you want to apply the change.
Warning: If you apply this change at the root organizational unit for the entire organization, the change isn’t applied to the organizational units where you made previous overrides for profile information.
Check the box next to Work location and click Save.

It takes up to 30 minutes for changes to propagate, when users can set their own location.

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