Conference Room Scheduling & Management

Are you keeping a piece of paper outside of the conference room to keep track of scheduling?  

Resource management, especially conference room management, is becoming more and more important.  The need to maximize the resources that are available in a given company has become a top priority throughout organizations.

As many organizations outfit technology within training rooms, conference rooms or huddle spaces, the next logical step is how to reserve the room.  Throughout many organizations today, those rooms are reserved by scheduling the resource through the companies email client - whether Microsoft Outlook, Google, etc.  The missing piece is how that data translates to the room itself.

Just imagine, your team is strategizing on how to penetrate emerging markets outside of your geographic territory with a white board full of great ideas when… your co-worker enters the room insisting that he/she has the conference room that you reserved.  Without any type of room scheduling or management solutions implemented, you and the team leave the room in hopes that you’re able to pick up where you left off. If this sounds familiar - good news! You’re not alone and even better news, there are tools that can assist!

When searching the market for this tool, you will discover that the solutions have changed within the past few years.  Approximately three years ago, many of these tools were solutions that required hours of programming and configuration.  In certain applications those systems are applicable, but in others, the focus is based on three factors: Scalability, Implementation & Ease of Use.  Let’s better understand each of these factors.

Scalability:

In business today, scalability is critical.  No matter how many rooms are formal boardrooms vs. huddle spaces, seats to a room, or geographic boundaries - technology provides organizations the ability for each room to look uniform, be managed by your current email client and provide the room-user with the same experience and behaviors whether your employees find themselves in Chicago today and Los Angeles tomorrow.

Implementation:

Gone are the days of installing a hardware solution and finding that your organization does not go live with the solution for another two weeks due to the backend coordination, programming and configuration and adoption of the software.  The market offers many solutions, such as Zoom Rooms, which allows users to utilize any type of device like an iPad or Android Tablet installed outside of a room, and through a simple, standardized user interface, it is up and running within a few hours.

Ease of Use:

The million dollar question now becomes - how easy are these solutions to use?  In today’s world, many of these solutions require the room-user to be technical - which inevitably has the room-user reaching out to the IT department to schedule room resources.  As with many of the solutions on the market today, Zoom Rooms are able to be reserved from the calendar within an organization's email client or through the front of the scheduling panel itself.  Additionally, with a bank of rooms lining the hallway of an organization, a user is able to understand which rooms are available just by looking at the tablet mounted outside of the room. The bottom quarter of the room scheduling solution will be lit green for available and red for occupied.  The benefit here is for room-users to conduct ad hoc meetings without having to schedule these resources from their desk.

Gone are the days of the piece of paper that is printed at 6 am only be outdated by 8 am.  Let Newgentek demonstrate the scalability, implementation and ease of use that room scheduling solutions offer!