Release Window: 2nd May 2026 to 30th June 2026

Graph-Powered Connections: Added support for a modern Microsoft Graph-driven Exchange connection mode that completely replaces deprecated Exchange Web Services (EWS), routing meeting creation securely via dedicated service accounts.

We've added a smarter, real-time availability check that makes sure non-Exchange resources are genuinely free before saving any changes to the schedule. This prevents overlap errors from slipping through, even when multiple people are updating the calendar at once or moving bookings around using drag-and-drop. By automatically stopping conflicting requests from going through, the system keeps your schedules accurate and dependable across the board.

Catering-Focused Layout: Introduced a new "Catering report" layout option based on the meeting production template that only includes only meetings with active catering bookings, streamlining kitchen production workflows (BAM-473).

Enhanced Special Character Support: Implemented robust UTF-8 encoding with Byte Order Mark (BOM) for report CSV exports, ensuring that complex international and accented characters render correctly when opened in external spreadsheet applications (BAM-485).

This update brings Microsoft Teams link generation directly to the Planner web app, making it just as easy to set up virtual meetings online as it is through Outlook. Previously, booking a room or resource on the web created a calendar reservation without a video link. This created extra manual work—especially for teams operating across different company networks or without access to the Outlook add-in. Now, anyone booking through the web interface can automatically generate a Teams link in a single step. This eliminates the need for messy workarounds, ensures remote and in-person attendees stay connected, and delivers a consistent, reliable experience for all hybrid meetings regardless of how they are scheduled.

Stronger Access & Session Controls: Improved how user sessions are managed to ensure accounts are thoroughly secured upon sign-out and inactive access is automatically limited.

Proactive Sign-In Defenses: Enhanced protection against automated, unauthorized attempts to access user accounts.

Increased Data Privacy: Standardised system responses across account management tools to better protect user identity and email privacy.

Overdue Resource Protection: Enforced rigorous business protections preventing standard users from deleting or altering catering, room, or equipment bookings once a configured cancellation deadline has passed (PHO-120).

Multi-Tenant Room Restrictions: Added proactive verification rules blocking users from combining or booking Exchange rooms from different Microsoft Entra tenants within the same meeting event (PHO-75).

Attendee Field Integrity: Resolved a data-loss bug in the Booking Experience where attendee emails without explicit names provided were stripped on form reload, correctly enforcing Unnamed treatments instead (BAM-417).

Participant Constraint Requirements: Corrected creation logic across interfaces to ensure that "External Participants Required" fields properly load as blank on initial load, validating compliance before permitting save actions (PHO-70).

All-Day Reschedule Validation: Streamlined date state machines to ensure that room selections and All-Day toggles synchronise flawlessly without triggering erroneous "could not be rescheduled" errors (BAM-505).

Dynamic Constraint Adjustments: Stabilised time-slice evaluation routines to prevent application range crashes when switching an active booking from an all-day event to a brief time slot containing catering lines (BAM-435).

Resource Timeline De-selection: Fixed timeline behaviour to ensure that when an All-Day booking is extended onto a restricted day, clicking the warning popup deselects the room cleanly (PHO-95).

Extended Input Lengths: Increased input limits for fields like Display Name (BAM-436) and Meeting Type Notes (BAM-494) to support longer text entries.

Catering Allocation Refresh: Fixed a calculation error where removing a catering stock item via the checkout trash icon failed to clear backend allocations, causing duplicate deductions on subsequent re-bookings (BAM-421).

Catering View Inconsistencies: Resolved an issue where removing a catering item from the checkout popup before the main list data finished loading left the line showing an unmodifiable "Not available" status (BAM-416).

Automatic Fee Cleanups: Programmed the system to automatically remove orphaned delivery fee bookings as soon as the last catering or equipment item incurring that fee is deleted from an order (BAM-440).

Real-Time Check-In Accuracy: Optimised Display panel caching to ensure the check-in "Confirm" button appears precisely at the start of the pre-meeting window, resolving lag issues for high-volume deployments (PHO-104).

Graceful License Cap Feedback: Upgraded display panel behaviour to block excessive room imports past the active hardware license limit with a clear, descriptive message rather than a technical error (BAM-524).

Typographical Character Truncation: Added line padding to the room name and meeting title headers on display screens, preventing descender text components like the letter "g" from being clipped at the bottom (BAM-506).

Graceful Timeout Handling: Fixed a data mapping issue on room display setups where an expired security token during long idle periods would yield a broken "undefined" success message box instead of routing to the logon screen (BAM-450).

Accurate Decline Reasoning: Re-engineered sync-driven email notifications to list the exact operational cause of an Exchange room rejection—such as a past start time or double booking—substituting the generic buffer text.(PHO-110).

Operational Context Flags: Updated successful synchronisation summary emails to dynamically flip the main header banner from green to a yellow "Attention" alert if any background policy auto-removes catering or equipment items (PHO-103).

Subject Line Character Decoding: Fixed an email subject line rendering bug where special punctuation characters, such as apostrophes, would display as raw HTML entities like ' rather than their decoded symbols (BAM-462).

No-Op Update Suppression: Suppressed duplicate update notifications that were erroneously dispatched to users a few minutes after back-to-back room bookings were successfully created on the same room resource (PHO-117).

Full Name Report Inclusions: Expanded the "Table Layout" and "Table Layout by room" report templates to include the full first and last name of booking owners, eliminating naming ambiguity for administrators (BAM-495).

Catering Interface Usability: Added an explicit close button to the resource info popups within the Rooms, Catering, and Equipment booking screens, enabling swift, intuitive modal dismissal (PHO-154).

Performance Responsiveness: Introduced targeted component caching and rendering loop constraints across the New Booking Experience tabs, dramatically accelerating step-to-step navigation speeds (PHO-169).

Browser Auto-fill Guardrails: Implemented robust form autocomplete attributes across My Settings forms, preventing standard web browsers from injecting active login details into empty note fields (PHO-160).

Sync Recovery Paths: Fixed a critical race condition where room bookings were systematically deleted from Planner 30 seconds after creation due to delayed calendar responses from Exchange, establishing an automatic recovery path (BAM-475).

Ad-Hoc Booking Execution: Restructured calendar ownership lookup rules to ensure that spontaneous meetings created on Display tablets utilising a Planner-only connection, successfully commit to Exchange via the primary Service Account (BAM-442).

Sub-Calendar Series Integration: Upgraded background polling routines to scan user sub-calendars thoroughly, resolving an infrastructure bug where only the first occurrence of a sub-calendar recurring series synced to Planner (PHO-165).

Time Extension Sync: Fixed a data discrepancy where extending a meeting's duration via Display or Outlook without the add-in open successfully updated the room but failed to sync the change to the organiser's calendar (BAM-511).

DST Transition Protections: Corrected date boundary calculations to prevent equipment resources from being dropped from long-term all-day bookings that cross seasonal Daylight Saving Time transition boundaries (BAM-446).

Cross-Location Panel Loading: Standardised add-in initialisation methods to allow the application panel to open without crashing when a user manually appends a cross-location Exchange room to an active meeting invitation (BAM-461).

Multi-Day Range Retention: Resolved an integration gap where anonymous/quantity-only attendee counts were completely lost on subsequent dates after a single meeting was updated to a recurring series in Outlook (BAM-515).

Room Schema Compliance: Fixed synchronisation filters to ensure that Planner-only rooms are cleanly stripped from a booking if the event is moved completely outside the allowed weekly resource availability schema (BAM-449).

Global Service Disruptions: Internal deduplication processing at the Microsoft Graph webhook layer to prevent message queue amplification during global service disruptions. (SHI-555)