Meeting room booking systems

Meeting Room Booking Systems

Meeting Room Booking Systems help nurture better communication and improve productivity. Meeting rooms are the focal point for communication, creative thinking, strategic planning and crisis management.

They are the core facility for the most vital decisions corporations make and are visible at all levels within an organization. They are also visible to both customers and suppliers, with the ability to enhance or damage that precious corporate image. It’s important when selecting a meeting room booking system that the corporate image can be maintained and enhanced for all users of the facilities. The key is to make your system reflect your image, prioritizing simplicity, usability and effectiveness. A complex system that promotes a booking system suppliers’ image over your own and one that isn’t particularly easy to use can potentially damage a corporate image, lead to reduced productivity and increased real estate overheads.

Providing broad access to booking facilities at the point of use from the desktop, from strategically placed kiosks or by using mobile apps, makes a meeting room booking system more effective. Integration with standard calendar and scheduling systems also makes the process of booking and using meeting rooms more productive. Whether you use MS Office365/Exchange, Google, IBM Notes or a third-party advanced booking system, a real-time integration will make it easier for service users to effectively manage their resource booking and meeting activities.

Whether you have 5 or 500 meeting rooms, it’s vital that the workforce can access these essential resources with ease and at a time that meets their business needs.

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Important Features

Meeting room booking systems
Workspace Booking Hardware

Top 10 Tips for a Successful Meeting Room Booking System

  • Integrate with central calendaring and scheduling systems

  • Have several strategies to reduce no-show or ghost meetings

  • Facilitate spontaneous meeting room bookings (not every meeting can be planned weeks in advance!)

  • Ensure regular reporting and analytics of system usage is acted on

  • Choose a system that is flexible enough to fit your business needs, don’t modify your business needs to fit the system on offer

  • Get workforce buy in to the cultural change required

  • Future proof your investment – make sure you have multiple upgrade paths

  • Your meeting room booking system must be able to fully reflect your corporate identity, not that of the supplier

  • SSO and RFID card authentication will help to make your system as easy as possible to use

  • Point of use equipment fault reporting will help ensure facilities are kept in fully working order

Do I Need Meeting Room Screens?

In short, you don’t need meeting room screens to deploy an entry level meeting room booking system. You could deploy a software only solution, that will provide a basic level of improved resource usage and better productivity.

What you won’t get is point of use status indication, point of use authentication, booking, check-in/out, extend, kiosk facilities from the room screen and improved corporate image. If you do choose to mount interactive devices outside meeting rooms then there are a range of options to suit all budgets.

One idea is to utilize Qubi3 devices outside meeting rooms with ResourceXpress huddlespace software. This provides most of the functionality that a meeting room screen provides at a fraction of the cost.

Another strategy is to deploy a mix of devices and software solutions to manage your meeting room booking system. You could deploy meeting room screens with very visible corporate branding to all the higher profile meeting rooms and use Qubi3’s or a kiosk based solution for the other meeting rooms. Make sure the meeting room booking system you select is capable of being flexible enough to deliver a multi-tiered solution.

Meeting room booking systems

Getting the Best Return on your Investment

ResourceXpress Meeting Room Booking Systems

Authentication Types

Making sure service users who book a meeting room actually use that resource fully is essential to the productivity of the meeting room booking system. One of the best ways to achieve this is by enforcing of policy of auto cancellation when a booking is not checked into at the point of use.

Integration

Your meeting room booking system should be able to connect with a wide range of leading calendar and scheduling applications (MS Exchange, MS 365, Google). This ensures you have the flexibility to change in the future if your corporate strategy changes. If you also have the ability to connect to multiple booking systems at the same time, then this provides the ultimate flexibility.

The ability to have a mix of “local only” bookable resources and those that can be booked from your preferred calendar and scheduling system lowers deployment and maintenance costs.

ResourceXpress has the additional capability to connect to a range of “Advanced Booking Systems”. This means you can deploy the core device management functionality of ResourceXpress and enjoy additional functionality of visitor management, catering etc, right up to a fully Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS).

The key point (as always) is to ensure you have as much flexibility as you can so that you’re not restricted in the future to any one system or hardware provider.

Foyes with access to meeting rooms
benefits of using ResourceXpress

Summary

Your meeting room booking system should make it easier to find and book resources and locate colleagues.

Don’t over specify your system requirements to suit what a solution’s functionality can offer! Fully integrated meeting room bookings systems with advanced functionality can be great but maybe your biggest return on investment is to simply optimize your room booking and lower real estate overheads.

A specialist application that delivers this core functionality may be a wiser business decision. It must be flexible enough to reflect your corporate identity and specific business needs.

Don’t change your business practices to suit a system’s shortcomings. Don’t get locked into single source hardware systems.

When hardware ages and requires replacement you need to have choices. If not, you may be stuck into paying the price the supplier wants to charge for their proprietary hardware.

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