Meeting Room Manager: A No-Brainer Business Decision

There are as many reasons to arrange a meeting as there are business in the world. It’s hard to exaggerate the frequency and need of the modern conference; they’re indispensable. So, with all the tools available to the modern office, how are meetings scheduled? With an email contact list, or maybe a whiteboard outside the conference room doors. For some, that’s a perfectly adequate solution. For most, meeting room management software would be ideal to eliminate wasted time on the minutia of meeting room scheduling.

Many hours are spent every week on the simple tasks of arranging meetings. These are hours that would be better spent on more productive areas of business — such as identifying the right room to meet in, or booking the equipment for a conference’s presentation, should take a minimum of effort and time. A meeting room scheduler can streamline the entire process of meeting preparation. Meeting Room Manager is such a software program. With comprehensive meeting room scheduler abilities, Meeting Room Manager can transform an outdated process into a quick application of software.

Spending two hours a week instead of five on meeting planning looks like a great deal on paper, but the truth is that it may not be noticeable in the regular work flow. Meeting Room Manager employs some key features in the service of efficiency, and the true benefits lie in the details that the users will use every day.

As any meeting room scheduler will tell you, a difficult aspect of their job is finding the proper resource. Maybe they need a projector, or something as simple as a chalkboard. With Meeting Room Manager, resource management is integrated into the powerful scheduling software. This means you’re able to arrange, implement, and track the use of resources for meetings, all from the same interface you use to schedule the meeting itself. It’s an idea so obvious it’s often overlooked by most meeting room management software programs. Meeting Room Manager makes sure this detail is an important factor in their program, enabling a complex and difficult process to work with just a few clicks on a web-based interface.

Once the meeting is finished, the work isn’t finished. Meeting Room Manager offers an optional add-on called Reports Designer, a handy feature that lets meeting room schedulers customize reports with a browser-based tool. Taking inventory and keeping track of meetings is an important way to manage meetings, and too many times it becomes overlooked after the meeting is over. With an integrated way to immediately report on meetings, Meeting Room Manager ensures it won’t be forgotten anymore.

It may seem like an unimportant step, using a software program to allocate resources and write a report on meetings. And certainly, these details are small enough to overlook for a lot of companies. Yet by taking the time to include every aspect of scheduling, Meeting Room Manager will reduce the time spent on meetings while at the same time maximizing their value.

 

Photo Courtesy The Richmond A.I.D.

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Businesses Waste Nearly 5 Hours Per Week Scheduling Meetings


We’ve heard it before, “So much time is wasted just sitting in meetings!” But did you know that even more additional time is wasted just planning them? Employees spend up to 4.8 hours per week trying to coordinate a meeting between multiple people using traditional methods like email and telephone calls, reports ReadWriteWeb, citing an October study.

The study, which examined the resource scheduling habits of 1,500 managers and administrators in Germany, France and the United States, noted that despite the many resource scheduling tools on the market for businesses, many people were using desktop calendars, email and phones to plan meetings. Only 1% reported using resource scheduling tools similar to NetSimplicity’s Meeting Room Manager.

And, if these staff members were using equipment scheduling software like MRM, they would not only be able to coordinate the various people in their organization, they’d be all squared away with the physical resources they need too. Whether it’s company-owned laptops, fleets of trucks, school buses or even industrial equipment, resource scheduling software goes far beyond simply reserving a conference room. You’ll be able to efficiently schedule and manage every single organization resource.

Moreover, if you’re not sure where those resources are, or are using a spreadsheet to track them, Meeting Room Manager saves you time by grouping them together so you can instantly view resources by location and track their use with built-in, easy-to-use reporting capabilities. The information can then be analyzed and communicated in visually effective graphs and reports, which can also be examined in detail, or exported into different formats. In the long term, that kind of data drastically improves a company’s ability to make intelligent decisions about its resources.

Rather than spend those five hours a week trying to get all your resources together — both people and locations — it certainly does make sense to work with resource scheduling tools.

 

 

photo courtesy procsilas

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Face to Face Will Always Have a Place

As many people have discovered the hard way, there are many things than can go wrong when arranging a conference. Montana State University decided to avoid many of the logistical hassles that plague large conferences containing divergent groups of participants and went high tech. Last week the university held a conference on molecular paleontology not in a meeting room but with video conferencing.

MSU is one of 14 schools to be funded by NASA, which gives them the opportunity to try such exciting new technologies. Ask anyone who held their wedding hundreds of miles away from home, maybe on an island: destination events are very difficult to execute. It’s often difficult for airlines to get traveling companions sitting next to one another, let alone getting to the right city in the right time frame. Professor John Peters, who helped organize the meeting, thinks video conferencing makes it easy to meet, but says that face to face meeting still have their place. “I think there’s room for both,” Peters said.

Anyone who has video chatted can agree with that. It’s fantastic to see someone thousands of miles away when you talk with them, but there are some things that don’t travel across streaming video. For most modern situations, a meeting room is plenty of technology — especially when it’s equipped with the right scheduling software.

The meeting room is the staple of the office, and for good reason. The positive benefits of meetings in any field is hard to exaggerate, and that’s why ensuring meeting rooms are maximized with scheduling software is so important. Modest conferences still have major issues to deal with: double booked meeting rooms, limited resources, missing audio/visual equipment, and so forth. Meeting scheduling software can help deal with those problems in a myriad of ways to help your company focus on what is important. The right software will integrate with Outlook to ensure everyone receives notifications, but it’s also important that you can arrange resources from the same interface. After all, there’s little use in ensuring good attendance when there’s no projector available to use.

Video conferencing is a valuable tool in an ever-shrinking world. There are some times when distances are too great, or time is too short to adequetely prepare a meeting room and vide conferences presents the best solution. Those, for the time being, are the exceptions. Face to face meetings, enhanced with modern scheduling software, are still the most feasible, useful, and best way to exchange ideas. Whether your needs are educational or business, meeting rooms will continue to be the standard bearer… especially if you’ve got scheduling software that’s ready to bridge the gap between the past and the future.

Photo Courtesy victoriapeckham

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Business Software Buying Checklist

Before you buy scheduling software, there are a number of important issues to consider. With so many different options on the market, it’s difficult to find Internet reservation software that fits all your needs. Because there’s so much difference from company to company as well, it’s vital to make choices based on your workplace’s needs. Some things to consider:

  1. Flexibility: Meeting room reservation software has to have a number of functions, but sometimes the most important aspect of software is the simplest. In this case, being able to access Internet reservation software from anywhere is a strong feature. The ideal software would synchronize with active Outlook accounts, have web access for convenience, and provide a universal calendar for everyone to conveniently see schedules. Make sure to buy scheduling software that can work for you, rather than against you!
  2. Cloud Capability:  As physical storage becomes more obsolete, the cloud becomes the preferred location for companies to do business. Why have a handful (or dozen!) of servers in a back room, when you can cut that unnecessary cost and work primarily online? While your company might be running on a internal network now, there’s a good chance in a few years you’ll be working on the cloud. For today and tomorrow, you’ll want a software program that possesses web-based, decentralized features like calendars and resource scheduling.
  3. Customization: You wouldn’t buy a car if you couldn’t adjust the seat to fit you. Meeting room reservation software is the same thing, you need a program that can make the process as comfortable as possible. Ensure that the Internet reservation software can be adjusted to your company’s specific needs. That includes an interface that’s easily adjustable, the ability to design and create customized reports for the meetings, as well as compatibility with your current payroll affiliate. Customization isn’t just specific to the meeting room software either: You’ll want software from a company that offers training, support, pricing options, and various other professional services, such as database adjustments. If you buy scheduling software that you can’t install, or that no one can explain, it doesn’t much matter if any of the other features are included!

Certainly there are a lot of options for Internet reservation software. With such an important decision to make, it can be easy to focus on flashy features or low price points and make a bad choice. Following the steps above will help your company benefit most from the new meeting room reservation software.

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Stop Wasting Time Scheduling Time

The conference room is arguably the most important room in any office. It’s where ideas are produced, where discussion is held, where businesses take shape. Too often, though, meetings are given the short straw of reputation: repetitive, unproductive, and rarely informative is the common view. In fact, meetings are vital to any business, and most offices hold a half dozen in any given week.

Part of the perception is due to the schedule making of the meeting itself. Even with online scheduling, arranging the basics of an office meeting can be daunting — there’s location, time, scheduling issues, duration problems, and many more. So it’s no wonder that recent studies estimate administrators and managers spend close to five hours a week just schedule making for meetings. If a manager has to devote such a substantial amount of time just to get people in the same room, then even if the meeting goes well the chances are it’s a loss for productivity overall.

How can that be solved? Most planners do so with a calendar and email, which is great for a casual BBQ, but lousy for the needs of a workplace. Online scheduling isn’t just replacing letters with emails, after all. Schedule making is a complex problem, and so the best solution will tackle all the major problems.

A great way to reduce the effort of scheduling is to hold a meeting at a consistent time and place. Most restaurants employ this to meet with the staff before each shift; to discuss specials, food availability, and so on. No time is wasted on schedule making. However, that isn’t a viable option for all offices. Online scheduling for meetings is a way to limit the inefficiencies of meeting schedule making. With modern software, it’s possible to book rooms, inform participants, update calendars on the fly, even design reports for the finished meetings. The most effective software can even schedule resources alongside online scheduling!

Resource scheduling will always be a challenge. With the right online scheduling software in place, the process of setting up a meeting becomes much less painful. When meetings don’t require hours of wasted time to arrange, productivity — and maybe the perception of meetings in general — can increase to a much better level.

 

Photo courtesy Robbert van der Steeg

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Is Enterprise Software Becoming More Social?

What is social? Everyone is talking about it — Facebook, Twitter, word of mouth and the “social graph” — but what does it really mean? More importantly, what does it mean for business?

If your business is a B2C and your target consumers are spending time online, social marketing is a must. Even B2B’s are finding that lead generation in the enterprise space benefits from presence in some of the professional social networks, such as LinkedIn. But having a Facebook fan page or developing and using applications that draw in social connections to collaborate or send information to them (i.e., activity streams) to date has been primarily on the external web — not in company intranets or SaaS enterprise software.

That is changing, fast. Many companies are recognizing the value of leveraging their employees’ social persona and familiarity with online social networking and thinking more about infusing those benefits into the features of their internal systems and processes.

Interestingly enough, the adoption of social features is now happening in roughly the inverse order of the age of the platform — SaaS first, then large big box native apps, observes business strategist and enterprise architect Dion Hinchcliffe.

Salesforce recently added a social layer to their CRM, and Epicor recently announced the addition of social features to its ERP system. Even formerly stodgy subjects such as supply chain management have started seeing the benefits of social computing, Hinchcliffe notes.

If you look at the enterprise software space, you’ll also see some dedicated “social software” companies, like Bluekiwi and Jive Software. The same kind of features that they offer — real-time collaboration, social profiles, and shared office calendars — will likely begin to be slowly integrated into software for business, such as a facility scheduler or reservations software. Eventually, these features may become an expected capability in all modern business software.

Apps may also become smaller, more web-based, mobile, and focused on self-service, with the ability to access things like room scheduling anytime, anywhere. See the pattern? Consumer-facing technology and applications were designed to match the fast-paced, social lifestyle of their target audiences; there’s no reason why tools designed for the working professional should be any different.

With social features in enterprise software, organizations can tap into their most valuable asset — its people — and improve and nurture positive business-oriented tasks like collaboration, mass participation, and team communication.

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Get More than 50% From Your Workforce

Less than 50% of the time employees spend at work add value to the final product or service, according to a study (pdf) that followed workers for 11,000 hours across four industries.

Shocked? Maybe not, if you already had an accurate perception of average levels of workforce efficiency. That is, if you were aware that high levels of productivity are severely lacking in modern workplace environments — despite of (or perhaps because of!) new technologies.

It does seem that a lot of energy went into developing office technologies, like networked printers, high-speed connections, and smartboards in meeting rooms, but sometimes offices forgot to implement scheduling technologies that help with managing resources, too!

No matter what fancy tools or tips you have in your office, without resource tracking, it’s difficult to run a tightly organized workplace. What use is the new audiovisual conference call meeting room if no one uses it when it comes time to plan a meeting? Or worse, double books it?

Scheduling management — the use of a centralized reservation system to keep track of who is using what room in your organization — can help you as a corporate or office leader to get more efficiency out of your workforce, which is extremely important if you are to get through this economic slump and achieve success on the other side.

But don’t just take it from us. “Assembling a system of people, processes, and tools can resolve [many] issues,” writes Forbes magazine. When you systematize things like payroll and create helpful structures like office calendars and business calendars for both your employees and office resources, “concerns will rise to the forefront and changes can be made to bring about self-sustaining improvement.”

In other words, the organization and benefits of your new resource tracking system will bleed into other aspects of your company and influence employees to make positive changes elsewhere.

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Big Company Event Coming Up? Try Event Schedule Software

Many companies and organizations feel the pains of the day to day meeting room schedule inefficiencies — whether it be double-booked rooms or time changes that prompt the inevitable “I didn’t know!” reaction from those who were not notified of it.

Some do something about it, effectuating positive change in their workplace by implementing a resource tracking or meeting room management tool, like NetSimplicity. But even those who have fully signed on to the benefits of a facility scheduler often don’t realize that it can (and should!) be used beyond the day to day. That is, Meeting Room Manager was designed to be stretched to its limits. What’s the use of having a smartphone, for example, if all you use it for is to check the time and make phone calls?

There are a lot of ways that you can use your company meeting planner software as event schedule software. Take, for example, your company’s holiday party. How do you usually plan, execute, and manage it? Does your office manager start by sending out a staff-wide email with the date and venue? Why not integrate this event into Meeting Room Manager + Outlook to make sure that everyone can see it and send their reply? Simply create a new “room” that will represent your venue and go about the invitations as if it were a meeting.

And because the event scheduling software also includes resource tracking, you can schedule any of your organization’s resources for that event as well. Doing a big slideshow at the company roast? Make sure to book the right A/V equipment for the appropriated room with the software’s resource tracking feature.

Here’s the really good part about using NetSimplicity for your company events. Visibility! In addition to notifications, you can use SocialView to share the event, including sub-events like executive-only cocktail gatherings or the hotel afterparty, with respective guests. You can embed this on the intranet, but you can also insert it onto an external website so that guests of your staff can have visibility into time, place, and other details. There is even a customizable request form for public users, so your communication is not just one way — you can field requests and responses from whomever you’d like.

Image courtesy Mothlike

 

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Little or Big, Schools Need Resource Scheduling

classroomThis summer we wrote about how despite the federal government’s increase in funding to schools, state education budgets took a huge hit last year — and many are still falling due to lack of funding from property taxes. One suggestion we had then was to take advantage of this belt-tightening to take deep look at your organization and see how you can improve efficiencies, namely in the area of school resource scheduling.

At the time, we mostly talked about universities, using our University of Tennessee campus scheduling software example. But nowadays, fast technology adoption and becoming “wired” is not limited to the 18-24 year olds — not in the least! Walking the halls of an average high school, middle school, and sometime even a grammar school, you’ll see students using the “cloud” — checking email, chatting online, blogging, liking and sharing links on Facebook, watching streaming video.

Why wouldn’t your school adopt cloud technology, too? Schools have traditionally kept their technologies, such as web calendars and classroom scheduling software, behind the closed doors on an in-house IT infrastructure. But hosting your own servers can be expensive and inaccessible. Imagine, as a school administrator, being able to troubleshoot your own tech issues by Googling it, rather than having to schedule an appointment with your respective IT person? Ironically, if it’s school resource scheduling and personal appointments are integrated into a propriety classroom scheduling software that you don’t understand… you just might not be able to figure out how to do it!

That’s why using an SaaS program like Meeting Room Manager for your class scheduling and web calendar makes so much sense, even in a non-university setting. With the ability to host the information in the cloud, teachers and administrators will be gain clear visibility into the school’s resources and be able to plan their facility use well ahead of time.

To quote one administrator, blogging about use of the cloud:

“[In my opinion] the first school that is able to utilize the power of blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS, pod casting, taggings, web 2.0 project management, in an integrated and unified manner to empower their students and staff will prevail in the end.”

Even at the primary and secondary school level, school scheduling software just makes things run smoother for everything, from PTO conferences to pep rallies. You can schedule students, classes, teachers and rooms; create groups, sub groups, split groups, schedule simultaneous classes and view individual student timetables. You can even track equipment!

*image courtesy of Night Owl City

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Think Like a Hotel Owner to Maximize Meeting Room Potential

Hoteliers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to maximize the spaces in their hotel — from double-booking the penthouse suite to opening up the steakhouse on the first floor for lunch on weekdays. “In a challenge as complex as function space management […] there are rarely clear indications of which business to take versus which to let go,” writes 4Hoteliers.

Some companies run into the same sort of complex problems when it comes to managing their facilities. With meeting room software, many of these can be avoided, of course. But here are a few issues that you or your meeting manager may not have even been aware of:

1. Different calculations of space. Often in reservation software, rooms are booked in terms of number of chairs around a conference room table. But what if the meeting is so short that you don’t need chairs? Suddenly, you have much more space in the room, because people are standing. Just as in hotel “think,” a group that is horizontally spacey is much more damaging than a group that is vertically spacey. Vertical space means the group needs too much space on the dates the guestrooms are in-house (for example, if a group fills half the hotel’s group room needs but requires all of the hotel’s function space). In meeting room terms, this means booking a room for 10 people with chairs, when there are really only 6 — and 2 of those people are presenting, so they’re standing up the entire time.

2. Breakouts. Events that take place in hotels and convention centers have to consider “breakout” rooms —the number, size, and assignment of breakout sessions from a big group. For large meetings, you should consider the idea of having shorter breakout sessions with smaller groups. Use your meeting room software to plan this; book a large room in the beginning for the whole group, then use the web calendar and reservation software to continue to book rooms, but a collection of smaller ones rather than the big one. You’ll find it much easier to do this than to simply get up in front of the group and ask that people divide themselves up. This way, you have room assignments for each breakout group.

3. Being realistic about need, and execution. Hotel and sales executives know the first step is to take every lead for room booking in their facility and re-work it to reflect reality. If the lead is for four peak nights but the program ends at 5pm on the third day, that fourth night is subject to 50% slippage or more, for example. They can use history to some extent, but it’s not really reliable in predicting a group’s behavior. In your office, you’ll need some common sense and a healthy dose of skepticism to help you understand the reality of meetings. You can send out invitations to a meeting and have it show up on everyone’s web calendar, but does that mean that everyone is going to show? Use your reservations software program to identify patterns over time, and better understand how many people will actually be at the meeting you booked.

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