We have a problem, people. Too often when we need a conference room or meeting space, we either can’t find an available room or the room we booked has been pirated by another group. Have you experienced this at your workplace?
In a competitive landscape, attracting and retaining top talent is hard. Organizations work to make the workplace experience great, and making room scheduling painless is one of the easiest wins. The truth is, it’s not as hard a problem as you might think.
The first thing to do is use the calendaring platform you already have. Internally at Smart Systems we use Microsoft 365; Google Workspace works the same way. Both let you define each conference room as a bookable resource so it can be added to a meeting invitation like any attendee — your IT admin (or whoever the “alpha-geek” in your company is) can set it up quickly.
Now your staff can schedule rooms and overbooking mostly disappears. However, the modern workforce is collaborative and agile. Meetings don’t always happen on a schedule, and sometimes a group needs a room for an impromptu brainstorming session.
Touch panels at the door that display a room’s availability — and let you reserve it right then and there — solve this problem.
When it comes to selecting the panel, it usually boils down to two options: a consumer tablet or a dedicated device. Having worked with both, I can tell you with certainty: the dedicated device is the way to go. As much as I love a good tablet, I recommend against rolling out an important office capability on a product that can walk away, isn’t purpose-built, and relies strictly on Wi-Fi.
At Smart Systems, we install Crestron room-scheduling touchscreens because they’re reliable, fast, and integrate natively with Microsoft 365 and Google calendars. On the technical side: a single PoE cable powers and connects the panel, it’s remotely manageable, and it carries enterprise security — 802.1x, TLS, HTTPS, Active Directory.
You might think a consumer tablet wins on cost, but once you factor in mounting hardware, power, and the management burden, the gap closes fast — and the dedicated panel is the one still on the wall in five years.
Panel installed — done? Not quite. It may come as a shock, but sometimes people cancel meetings and don’t remove them from the schedule, especially recurring meetings booked far in advance. For rooms with a control system, an occupancy sensor plus a little logic releases the room when nobody shows up — and even when a meeting ends early — returning it to the pool of available rooms.
Of course, nothing can stop someone from the C-Suite from sniping the room you booked a week ago and sending your group off like office nomads in search of a new home. But a proper room scheduling system eliminates most of your organization’s meeting room mayhem — we’d be glad to set one up.