Otdfbt

This appears to be a "known" issue, but apparently no fix for it. However, I've been impressed before at the tenacity of the experts here to figure out an answer/fix.

ISSUE

When booking a New Meeting in Outlook (2013 or 2010) and choosing the Rooms button:

The default list that opens is the Offline Global Address List:

Which means a user has to change from the Offline Global Address List to the All Rooms list as shown here in order to easily pick from the list of actual rooms/resources:

This isn't the default however for On-Premise Exchange servers. They default "correctly" to the All Rooms list when you click the Rooms button in the meeting request.

While the option of using the Room Finder is there and does work, users have to know to click the Room Finder choice and it doesn't fix the actual root issue here.

MY RESEARCH

A few links I've found:

http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/158/t/41013.aspx

http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/148/p/24139/113954.aspx

http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/172/t/58824.aspx

It was suggested that it might be that the "msExchResourceAddressLists attribute has incorrect value set". I checked my config by running:

Get-OrganizationConfig | Select-Object ResourceAddressLists

and the output was what it should be:

ResourceAddressLists
--------------------
All Rooms

QUESTION

Does anyone have a fix that will make the All Rooms list be the default list when clicking the Rooms button in Outlook when using Office 365 / Exchange Online?

I'm having a similar problem with a user.
Office 2013 x64 ProPlus
Exchange 2010 on-prem
Everyone else correctly gets the rooms when clicking on the rooms button but this one user gets an error and appears to be looking for the rooms in her user contacts list instead of the Global Address List.
We can select a room if she changes the list over to Global Address List and selects the Room Resource from there.

So my work around for now is to have them click past the error/warning and change over to the Global Address List and select a Room Resource from there.

Still looking for a better permanent solution.

I just recently discovered Room List Distribution Groups, which provide a much more functional method for reserving rooms using the Outlook Room Finder.

Have you tried using this, and seeing if it also resolves the problem you are having with selecting the wrong address book?

To set up a room list for all room mailboxes on your site, you use the Powershell commands

New-DistributionGroup "Conference Rooms" -RoomList 
Get-Mailbox | Where-Object $_.RecipientTypeDetails -eq "RoomMailbox" | %add-distributiongroupmember -identity "Conference Rooms" -member $_.alias

Once you've set up a room list, it is visible in Outlook when making a new Meeting request. The nice feature of this is that it will only display the available rooms for the date/time of the meeting.

This is the resource I used for accomplishing it with Office 365, but the Powershell commands and end-user experience are the same in on-premises at least back to Exchange 2010.