[Closed] Smart panels/tablets outside meeting rooms

Without wishing to data mine I suspect your IT department are being lazy and hiding behind the work your department does.

I've visited a NGO in Manchester that used them. I think maybe contact someon in govtnmet digital who Might know.

Edit: can't you use some kind of forms based calendar booking system? All on Line with calendar view and what has been locked. I forget the software apologies.

When we first moved into our office we had the printouts of the calendar. We then got the smart panels linked to outlook, now we have those but also if its free you can tap the panel and get and instant 1 hour booking to the nearest 30 mins which works really well. Unfortunately i have no idea how it works but its integrated to Outlook.

Create a calendar for each room. To book a room you invite it to the meeting. This will then show in the room's calendar as busy so no-one else books it. That works for the computer side of it and is often easier that setting up the rooms as resources or what ever the proper way of doing it. Unfortunately your IT team will probably have procedures against fictional Outlook accounts.

For the physical checking of the room you can stick post-its on the door with the name and time of the meeting if you need that.

I work in a civil service office with lots of meeting rooms and every jumped up manager loves a meeting!
We don’t have any of this leaving bookings on the door. There’s a central booking system and people refer to this to see if a room is free (much like your outlook calendar) . If you’ve booked it and someone is in there you ask them to leave. I don’t really see the point of screens etc you are just pandering to people who CBA’ed to just check, by a fairly simple means, if a room is booked.
That’ll be £250 please.

Only an associated post, but we had a demo system set up that checked room occupancy against the room calendar. If folk booked a meeting room, but nobody attended, it would send a polite reminder to the host to cancel unwanted bookings. This does help to get people to unbook if they no longer need the room. Obvs the polite message became less polite for repeat offenders.

Worked with someone who sold stuff to Tesco. He loved to tell you that the meeting rooms that producers pitched in were on a timer - you couldn’t get in until your slot opened, and you had no longer then your allotted time at which point the door would open again requiring you to leave.

We just use an outlook based calendar for each meeting room.

I’ve previously installed the condeco screens/system at a large mobile co.
Anything beyond your current print:stick system is going to need some IT support/effort though.

I spoke to the government IT department about it and they said “no”

You need someone with sufficient clout to remind them that they work to service your business needs! Good luck!

An alternative that might work either with minimal input from a vaguely helpful person their side or some detective work yourside - are the meeting room free/busy status' published on your intranet anywhere? If you can find a URL you can make it a QR code and stick on the door - assuming of course you are allowed to connect mobile devices to the relevant network the free/busy is on.

Use Outlook calendars for each room and the inbuilt Roomfinder capability. The panels snd associated cabling infrastructure are overkill.

The OP mentions that each room has an outlook calendar. Surely you can take the phone out of your pocket and view the room calendar then if needed and it's free just use the outlook app to book it? Or is there some daft quirk of your IT system blocking this feature?
I did this at work today when I needed a meeting room at short notice as I had a teams meeting and a plumber was taking our office apart at the time.
Added advantage was that the meeting room has functional heating which our office currently does not.

The issue sounds more like a training\behaviour thing than an IT thing.

You already have a system to book out meeting rooms.

If someone needs to book a room, they do it via the already used outlook calendar. If someone has decided to use an empty room that is actually booked, the people who have booked the room politely tell the people in there that they have the room booked from X until X.

Simple.

People will soon learn that if they don't want to be kicked out of a meeting room they haven't booked out, they need to book it out.

It's a system that's worked well for years in many many different companies.

We've created a meeting room as venue in our Outlook (and all 8 desks in the office). You then book meeting in calendar as normal and put the venue as that room.

You then create a shared calendar shortcut in outlook - and voila everyone can see what's booked and who's attending.

You also need a small window in each room to see who is in there.

Just hang little blackboards outside each, with a supply of chalk.

If you want to book a room, you have to walk to the blackboard and chalk up your slot, if it's not already taken.

This simple measure will reduce IT spend and cut back drastically on the amount of pointless meetings that get thrown in via Outlook, thank me later.

If its anything like the company I work for it will be a waste of time anyway. Meeting room booking behaviour is atrocious...people booking meetings and cancelling them but not taking them out in the system is a big problem. The big misunderstanding about IT is that it can fix underlying process problems...it cant and that is why most IT implementations fail...transfer poor processes and behaviours to a system with IT just makes it more efficient at being inefficient.

With everyone having mobile phones and, presumably, connected to the conference room booking systems why do you need something outside the room showing its bookings for that day? You can just look it up on your phone?

All our conference rooms are set up in our address books so when you book a meeting you just put the conference room in the attendees list so when you look at that rooms calendar you can see when it is free or booked...in theory if people exhibited good disciplines.

I don't think public sector give all staff mobile phones sadly.

Set up MS Teams Rooms for my last org (left in July) already big users of MS Teams (and O365) which was a major benefit when Covid struck... (this rollout was met with resistance at the time)

Avoided the screens outside meeting rooms as they were expensive and everybody already had at least 1 digital device so were able to access Teams all the time. The Teams bit worked very well.

Issue was as above, most users are dense and reluctant to use anything new so will scupper/subtly sabotage new initiatives, refuse to attend training then the good idea looks likes a white elephant.

I was the Director of IT and although I would expect us to already be implementing similar technology or have a good alternative. If we didnt and you came to my team with an idea and enthusiasm and a member of my team gave (from what you said) that response. I would be having serious word.

I am a little bit bitter.

Issue was as above, most users are dense and reluctant to use anything new so will scupper/subtly sabotage new initiatives, refuse to attend training then the good idea looks likes a white elephant.

If anything supposed to make life easier requires 'training', it deserves to fail; most users are smart, not dense, and instinctively (like water) fall towards easier, simpler solutions while avoiding overcomplicated or overblown ones.

Little chalkboards it is then.

Humane, organic, energy-efficient, fun, reduce overreliance on Teams (all cloud systems come with an environmental cost, so the less we use them, the better it is for the planet).

Humane, organic, energy-efficient, fun, reduce overreliance on Teams (all cloud systems come with an environmental cost, so the less we use them, the better it is for the planet).

Except that its also not very useful. That might work for 1 day, maybe 1 week - but what if I want to book the big room two weeks on Tuesday? It also doesn't lend itself well to remote workers - how do I book the room for tomorrow when I'm working from home today? So I'm not sure you really do achieve the environmental benefits you think since (1) the only way to ensure lots of capacity at a few days notice is to have too much space (all heated, etc) or to use the electronic bookings anyway for long term and pay someone to update the blackboards every day (2) it encourages totally unnecessary travel to the office just so you have the same ability to book stuff as everyone else.

I don’t think public sector give all staff mobile phones sadly.

I don't think they need to - provided they have a BYOD policy that lets them access outlook/teams on their own phone. Anyone who in 2021 doesn't have a smartphone is not going to engage well with a door-mounted touch screen!

Except that its also not very useful. That might work for 1 day, maybe 1 week – but what if I want to book the big room two weeks on Tuesday? It also doesn’t lend itself well to remote workers – how do I book the room for tomorrow when I’m working from home today? So I’m not sure you really do achieve the environmental benefits you think since (1) the only way to ensure lots of capacity at a few days notice is to have too much space (all heated, etc) or to use the electronic bookings anyway for long term and pay someone to update the blackboards every day (2) it encourages totally unnecessary travel to the office just so you have the same ability to book stuff as everyone else.

Yawn 🙂

I am definitely going with blackboards in my offices, much more fun; and pedantry is the enemy of style and creativity.

Your meetings aren't as important as you think they are.

I don't want my clients to see a load of unused, expensive tech, and think 'here's a company that's lost in the digital wilderness': I want them to see my offices and think 'here's a bunch of people who have not lost the human touch, and who have a sense of style and fun'.

If anything supposed to make life easier requires ‘training’, it deserves to fail; most users are smart, not dense, and instinctively (like water) fall towards easier, simpler solutions while avoiding overcomplicated or overblown ones.

I take it back I didnt meant the dense remark however implementing new systems is seldom about making things easier, often the rationale is to streamline or improve processes, reduce cost, or enhance for example a specific area such as customer service. These are seldom intuitive and in my experience always require training and commitment. IME organisations are quite rigid in the systems and processes they use and dont take kindly to staff creating their own processes! Users of systems do tend to be very conservative and many resist change preferring to continue with systems they have worked with for some time and become comfortable with, there lies the rub and why IT changes often fail or are delayed, IT implementations problems are usually more related to people than systems and software.

I am definitely going with blackboards in my offices, much more fun; and pedantry is the enemy of style and creativity.

I admire your optimism but I suspect the reality will be nobody updating it as its an effort so will be mostly out of date...chalk going missing...board rubbers going missing....office jokers drawing ejaculating penises on it....will become a rod for peoples backs and will not succeed. Exactly the same as every single white board in our office and conference room space.

If you must have a schedule pinned to the wall outside the conference room then probably just better off having a secretary print off the daily schedule and pin it up.

office jokers drawing ejaculating penises on it

yeah, probably me 🙂

…having locked all the meeting room doors, forcing people to do some actual work instead of sitting in little rooms talking about it all the time

Thanks everyone.

Much of this echoes my thoughts on it.
I'll speak to my boss about. He's head of operations so is in charge of internal processes.

Think it's one of those back to first principles chats - what is the actual problem, what are we trying to achieve?

Yeah I'm unclear what the issue is - making booking meeting rooms easier or making it easier for people to quickly check if the meeting room they're standing outside of is free or not (with up-to-date info). The first part is trivial, the second part those screens look like a decent but expensive solution. As someone else said can't people just carry their mobiles with the Teams client/Outlook on it? I'll be honest though we do just have print-outs on the door that are updated each day...

We don't have work mobiles and no BYOD allowed

When I was contracting at a Scottish utility a couple of years ago, rooms were at such a premium that speculative bookings were made weeks in advance and unused bookings were traded like snout in a prison.
There’s a PhD somewhere in meeting room booking behaviour!

We don’t have work mobiles and no BYOD allowed

Presumably folk do have access to a computer that can show the room booking diary though?

Crestron / MS Teams panels are way over priced and a beeeitch to maintain.

Check out something like this instead:
https://envoy.com/products/conference-room-scheduling-software/

Everything you need, free for uptown 10 meeting rooms. Run it on iPads.

Put them on the wall using something like:
https://hecklerdesign.com/collections/ipad-room-schedulers

We had the 'print out of the calendar' thing about 20 years ago, which were fastened in holders which weren't easy to access. Unfortunately I forgot this detail while booking a meeting room for a vist from our least favourite sales people.

This then required making sure one of team was standing in front of the print out when they were entering and leaving the room for the 'Meeting with Fxccing Sales Weasels'...

Condeco solutions integrated into Outlook can work really well. What it doesn’t address is a meeting-orientated culture - that a few posters above have highlighted. The biggest difference I have found is whether your organisation can accept a culture of conversations and increased personal responsibility for decisions. All decisions or avoidance of by committee is a terrible place to be.