Working with Resource Central room screens (DSS)
This video demonstrates how to work with Resource Central room screens – aka Digital Sign Service (DSS)
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This video demonstrates how to work with Resource Central room screens – aka Digital Sign Service (DSS)
This video demonstrates the Resource Central workspace booking app.
This video shows how facilities and office staff can use Resource Central to temporarily block out sections of your office estate from bookings.
This video provides a tour of the Resource Central Outlook add-in.
Resource Central works with native Microsoft resource mailboxes and gives enterprises the option to seamlessly extend this service to add requests for catering, equipment, visitor passes and more.
Unforeseen circumstances can necessitate changes to meeting arrangements. Resource Central’s Booking Manager offers a seamless solution.
With a simple ‘drag and drop’ functionality, moving meetings between rooms, adjusting times, or canceling appointments becomes effortless.
Additionally, the ability to categorise meetings by type allows managers to easily distinguish between internal and external meetings, ensuring efficient scheduling management.
This is because older versions of Microsoft Exchange and Outlook did very little to prevent accidental double-bookings of resource mailboxes.
Thankfully, advancements in later versions of Outlook and Exchange Online have vastly improved this issue.
Microsoft is continuously enhancing its resource mailbox capability to provide better solutions that streamline the management of shared spaces including meeting rooms, individual desks, and more recently, shared workspaces.
There are, however, still a few ‘gotchas’ to be aware of. Here’s my top three tips to avoid double bookings:
Whilst this might seem like a great idea to assist administration of rooms and other resources, it can cause major problems: Adding, moving or deleting appointments directly in a resource calendar bypasses the built-in Exchange calendar processing functions.
This means it’s possible to break any booking policies that might be in place.
More importantly, it’s possible to move a booking over the top of another, creating a double-booking. Unfortunately, there is no overall management console available in native Exchange to manage other’s bookings.
The only real option is to have access to everyone’s calendars and perform any actions from within those….. but that’s an administrative nightmare. This is one reason companies look for a resource booking system with full bookings management capabilities that can be used by your FM team.
Some companies like the idea of someone having to approve any bookings made before they are fully confirmed. Particularly for the more ‘prestige’ areas such as boardrooms, or those rooms with specialist equipment.
Delegate approval in Exchange allows one or more people to receive an email requesting approval, with buttons to accept or decline the request.
The issue is that the acceptance of a booking in this way will not consider if there are any conflicting bookings at the same time.
It is therefore down to the approver to not only check the validity of the request from the booker but also check in the resource calendar that there will be no conflict with another booking.
Remember, this approval process will occur on any new or modified booking for any room with this enabled…. That’s quite a lot of effort for anyone to add to their busy workload.
A decent resource booking system can align with delegate approval if you still wish to use it, but can also help create booking policies promoting self-service, whilst allowing administrators to move or cancel bookings without complications.
If you’re using a third-party resource booking system that is poorly integrated with native Outlook and Exchange, you may be causing more issues than you are solving.
The ability for a resource booking system to work alongside native Microsoft resource mailboxes is critical if you want to continue using the native Exchange resource functions.
This is becoming more and more important as many companies roll out Teams Meeting Rooms and as the scheduling assistant and Room Finder capability in Outlook is improved.
The net result is that some end users may well be set in their ways and will continue to book resources using native Outlook calendar, whereas other users will prefer working with a dedicated room or desk booking system. If this is the case, make sure this ‘dual approach’ scenario will not have a detrimental effect, in particular with double bookings. For this reason, you may in fact decide to hide the Room Finder service.
And, on the same subject (but leading to a different outcome), if your desk booking system is not properly linked with native resource mailboxes, the act of cancelling a desk booking in Outlook calendar might not release the resource in Exchange. This will mean that the resource will still show up as busy when someone else tries to book it, when in fact it’s free.
In a nutshell, by following best practices and using well-integrated resource booking systems, you can say goodbye to double bookings of meeting rooms, desks and other resources you choose to book using Microsoft Outlook Calendar or a dedicated resource booking solution.
This means smoother scheduling, improved productivity, and a better user experience (and no fighting).
Speak with one of our experts to see how we can deliver a no-conflict resource booking solution for your enterprise.
Having a good strategy for identifying meeting rooms in a large organisation can be a challenge – especially when there’s 100’s of different rooms, floors, room sizes, room types, different locations and so on.
Here’s our tips for naming your rooms and collaboration spaces in a way that makes it easy for your workforce to book a meeting room in advance, and easily locate it on arrival.
For larger organisations with hundreds of meeting locations across multiple locations, being able to uniquely identify each room is useful – especially for the facilities management team.
An example of an ‘extreme’ naming convention we saw at a customer site incorporated the following attributes into each room name:
‘RESOURCE TYPE’ + ‘LOCATION CODE’ + ‘BUILDING CODE’, ‘FLOOR NUMBER’, ‘ROOM NUMBER’, ‘CAPACITY’, ‘AVAILABLE EQUIPMENT’, ‘ACTUAL ROOM NAME’
This resulted in, for example: ROOM THAMES VALLEY PARK BUILDING 5 GROUND FLOOR 0.01 96 AV VC Chicago 1
Although this might be OK for ‘behind the scenes’ reference purposes, the room name you put on signage, use in room booking systems and display on room screens should be vastly simplified.
For example, it’s obvious the resource is a ‘room’, and hopefully the staff member will know what building they are in, so including all this information into the ‘display’ name is not necessary. Information like the room capacity and facilities can be included elsewhere on the screen – and not be part of the name.
The most relevant information for the ‘end user’ is the actual room name (using our example, ‘Chicago 1’) and also a short room number (see next point).
A well-crafted room labelling convention should help individuals find their booked meeting room in a new or re-worked office space quickly, with minimal hunting around. It can also minimise the amount of signage you need around the office space.
According to Peter Teachen, an Architectural Project Manager with vast office design experience, “Way-finding should always be linked to the subconscious and not need to be taught. For example if I walk into an office and I need to find room 3D, if the first few rooms I encounter from the main entrance are 3A followed by 3B, this will subconsciously let me know I’m walking in the right direction towards 3D.
For organisations that wish to label rooms with a friendly name such as ‘London Room’, I always suggest that this used as the second identifier, not the main. Applying a chronological label (be it 1,2,3, A,B,C or a combination thereof) alongside a more ‘friendly room name’ can help individuals find their room with minimal effort and minimal signage.”
A similar approach works well for helping find individual workspaces and hot desks in a large office.
Cueing into visual references in and around your office is another great idea to help your workforce navigate with confidence around an unfamiliar space.
For example “The orange room”, “The purple room”, for example, if that matches your colour scheme.
Some of our clients name their rooms after the view or road that corresponds with the side of the building a room is on. For example, the Thames Room, ‘St Paul’s’ and ‘Shoreditch’.
These concepts can be reflected in the design of the interactive floor plan, e.g., by adding the relevant colours, imagery and naming of locations that surround the office space.
All of these ‘clues’ helps individuals find the meeting room they are supposed to be in when they arrive.
Here is a nice example of how a simple room name has been extended to room booking panel and the actual design of the room itself – all of which helps enhance the staff (and visitor) experience.
If you’re commissioning a new set of meeting rooms and want to use ‘friendly’ room names, take the opportunity to be inclusive and seek ideas from your workforce. Perhaps having a competition will be a source of inspiration.
We’ve seen some interesting concepts for naming rooms over the years. Our favourite ones are where the room names are consistent with the company’s line of business or heritage.
For example, names of scientists would work well in a research establishment.
Whatever you choose as a concept, ensure there’s enough scope to cover current and projected growth plans. Colours of the rainbow will run out when you create your 8th workspace!
Making sure names are memorable really helps. And, if it’s right for your business, you could come up with some fun names and ‘alternative’ room names.
In all of this it’s important not to commit a faux pas that will later offend employees and visitors. For example, ensuring even gender representation and cross-cultural balance is important in this process.
For this reason, make sure you start any room naming process well in advance of commissioning your new space, as it can take longer than you think to make sure everyone is happy. Also any changes to room names can be costly and confusing.
Our favourite naming idea to date is a company that referred to characters created by (Bristol based) Aardman animation. This resulted in ‘Wallace’, ‘Gromit’, ‘Morph’, ‘Shaun’, ‘Feathers’, etc., however we were slightly disappointed when Gromit was ‘dropped’ in favour of ‘Gwendoline’ to ensure female representation. I’d have dropped the villain, Feathers, instead, as what is Wallace without Gromit?
There’s many other minor (and major) things to consider when implementing systems designed to streamline your room and resource booking systems, contact us to find out more.
Making the necessary changes that enable workforces to adapt to a shrinking office space – especially where that means adopting ‘non-territorial working’ – requires a multi-discipline strategy involving people, design and technology.
For example:
If you use Microsoft 365, the great news is that you already have the ideal platform on which to build and streamline resource booking and management.
These are the default collaboration and scheduling applications that are already embedded in users’ working practices. Booking a meeting room, a Teams room or a workspace is possible within Outlook or Teams, at the same time as booking a meeting with co-workers and individuals outside of the organisation, and using native functionality.
With Microsoft 365 you have:
Your existing platform uses Windows auth and AD access rights/privileges to govern access and enable single sign-on.
Powerful tools like the Resource Booking and Scheduling Assistants and Cortana make it easy to find the right time for a group of people and coordinate schedules across multiple time zones.
Using regular Outlook calendar and other Microsoft-standard infrastructure means failover and protection against obsolescence is built-in.
To allow users to book meeting rooms at the same time as scheduling a meeting, Microsoft 365 offers the concept of resource mailboxes.
Simply put, a resource mailbox is a proxy that represents a room (or other limited resource) and can be invited along with the other attendees in order to reserve it.
There are now 3 types of resource mailboxes for representing Rooms, Equipment, and more recently Workspaces (which is a bookable space type that has an overall capacity associated with it).
You can associate attributes such as capacity and accessibility. Furthermore put these resources into lists that reflect their location.
So now, when you’re searching for a meeting room – or other workspace – a neat thing you can do in Outlook* is use a service called the ‘Room Finder’ that lets you start narrowing down your search according to the city (and then the building) you want to visit, and the facilities you need in the workspace.
This is thanks to the Room Finder, which when used in combination with well-defined room lists and attributes, lets you select available workspaces from a drop down list.
*At the time of writing this capability was limited in Teams.
With all this great – and evolving – functionality on hand, it makes 100% sense that any solution you choose to streamline resource booking and management builds on this functionality and doesn’t try to replicate it with a separately managed, secured and disjointed platform.
Available on-premises or in Microsoft Azure, our resource essentials solutions have been developed from the ground up to run in your Microsoft environment and leverage your existing investment in terms of user skills and infrastructure.
This means that issues like user learning curve, security, calendar privacy, delegate access, cross-time zone timings, integration with Microsoft conferencing, duplicate meetings, etc, are all non-issues.
Building directly onto your Microsoft 365 platform we deliver:
Discover how we can help you manage your meeting rooms & desk bookings in order to utilise your estates more effectively.
Productive meetings have been a hot subject since that Elon Musk leaked email. But why did Elon chose to target meetings in order to increase company output?
Did you know that that the average Executive spends about 18 hours a week at meetings?
Yet, almost half of us view meetings as one of the biggest time-wasters at work.
Elon is not alone in thinking that effective meetings can increase productivity.
Does that remind you of your meetings? Take heart because we’ve all been there.
Everything in business is about reducing costs and increasing profit. You will be surprised at how much a meeting costs and the impact they have on your bottom line. That’s why it is very important to aim for effective meetings.
Forward-thinking organisations and individuals alike have found several new approaches to drive effective meetings. Some approaches are straightforward, but some are more radical.
Most CEOs agree that being on time, reducing meeting times and setting the agenda early are ways to improve meeting effectiveness. Some have taken more extreme tactics including removing chairs and banning phones and laptops during meetings.
Technology can also have a positive impact on running meetings more effectively. From assisting with scheduling meetings to facilitating meetings altogether; there are several tools that can supercharge your meeting efficiency.
Finding the right time and place for your meeting can be a huge time sink before you even start your meeting. You get the endless back and forth emails to find the best meeting time or to reschedule double-booked meetings.
Outlook scheduling assistant can be a great start and help you save time finding a mutually convenient time slot with co-workers.
However, not all meetings are internal, and in most cases, you do need to meet with people outside of your organisation.
This is where tools like Microsoft Scheduling Poll, Doodle or Calendly come into play. By synchronising your available or desired meeting times, you can quickly get to a mutually convenient slot.
We love using FindTime in conjunction with our solution, as it’s the free native Office 365 tool from Microsoft.
What happens when you need to book meeting rooms and other resources and services like catering, AV equipment, or even parking? This can result in even more phone calls and emails to catering and reception staff.
Resource Management solutions enable you to book meeting rooms and other resources all in one place. On top of that, integration with Outlook Calendar provides greater end-user experience.
When people are late to meetings, this can result in unnecessary delays. There is the need to recap and to extend meetings to cover the agenda. Over-runs start interfering with other meetings, causing disarray not only to you but to colleagues.
Calendar apps notify individuals through email and push notifications, helping staff to be on time.
Yet, that covers only the meeting participants. What about all the other elements that come into play to get your meeting off to a fast start.
It would not be the first time a teleconferencing camera or microphone failed to work.
Similarly, visitors and co-workers from other offices can get held up in reception as they attempt to locate where they need to go.
Resource Management tools make sure that any service providers, such as technicians, reception staff and the all-important catering staff get timely notifications on exactly what meetings are taking place and what their role is in making them go like clock-work.
Maps and wayfinding displays can also help visitors navigate to the right meeting room.
Aside from helping get everyone to the meeting on time, these types of services make great first impressions, especially on visitors!
Nonetheless, getting people on time to meetings is not even your biggest challenge. Meetings that fail to take place are!
A study carried out by collaboration experts Atlassian found that 96% of the people they surveyed had at some point missed a meeting and this is money down the drain when real-estate costs are at an all-time high.
When our customer, Airbus, went through an estates rationalisation, they decreased the number of meeting rooms by 20%, but still had to facilitate the same number of meetings.
Through our utilisation reporting, they came to realise that people had a habit of booking recurring meetings and forgetting to cancel them.
That meant empty rooms that could have been used for other meetings.
Using meeting room display technology, Airbus is now automatically releasing meeting rooms when organisers don’t check in on time. This enabled them to release a staggering 3,300 hours of meeting room capacity each month.
Other companies are going more hard-core in an attempt to break the no-show habit. For example, with our solution, it’s possible to stop repeat offenders booking any more meetings for a while.
Apart from tracking actual room utilisation and check-ins, room screens enable a at-a-glance visibility of meeting room availability and create a great impression.
You should always test whether you actually need a meeting. Once you have established that, then you can decide the time and place.
Importantly, the place doesn’t necessarily need to be a meeting room. It can be a nearby café or, even better, online.
Leveraging tools like Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, Zoom and many other online meeting tools can reduce the costs associated with physical meetings.
Resource Management solutions make it extremely easy to schedule virtual meetings and conferences. With the click of a button, you can turn your meeting into a Skype for Business meeting or conference call.
Meeting agendas, as we saw, was high on the list for running effective meetings.
There are lots of great tips to on how to create an effective meeting agenda.
However, having an agenda in place and making people stick to it are two different matters. And sometimes, removing technology can be a good thing.
To make your meetings stickier, as pointed above, you can eliminate laptops and mobiles from meetings.
Laptops and mobiles can become counterproductive, especially in meetings. by allowing people to hop on to other tasks (73% of us tend to do other work).
Our tip is to only allow laptops for the designated note takers and for presentations, thus gaining more control over your meeting.
Subsequently, to be even more productive with your meeting action plans, you can use several tools for minutes and note taking.
As cloud empowers collaboration, you can share note-taking and no other tool is more straight-forward or familiar than Word; and in this case Word Online.
And, if you are running a task management tool like Planner, Asana or Trello, you can easily attach a shared Word link to the appropriate task.
Recent advancements in Cloud computing and apps have enabled us to increase our efficiency. There are lots of tools that we can use to be more productive, and meetings are no exception.
It is important to choose the right tools, get the most out of them and make sure they tie in with what you currently use for your day-to-day calendaring and collaboration.
Add technology to your meetings, like the tools we mentioned above, and watch your meeting effectiveness skyrocket and your workspace optimisation improve.
Let us know in the comments if you know other ways that technology promotes effective meetings.