Abandoned meeting protection

Updated

Overview

The no-show (abandoned) meeting feature automatically releases a room when nobody shows up to a scheduled meeting. This frees the room up for others who may want to use it and makes it easy to keep outdated recurring meetings from piling up in your conference rooms.

How it works 

When nobody checks into a scheduled meeting within a customizable time window, Robin will release the room. People can check in to meeting rooms by tapping "Check-in or Start meeting" on the display app, or by confirming the space ahead of time from the mobile app, Slack integration, or the web dashboard.

unbooking-gif.gifRequired settings

Before you can enable this feature, spaces need to be paired with the Rooms display app.

  • This setting can be managed by an administrator from the web dashboard for an entire location or a particular space.

  • Navigate to Manage > Offices, and then click the location and space you'd like to update settings for. From the space or building management page, scroll down to "Room Display & Display Scheduling". From there, you will find the required settings.

Watch the video tutorial or follow the steps listed below on how to enable Abandoned Meeting Protection.

Part 1: Enable check-in button

The Rooms background is yellow (default setting) when a room is booked and no one has checked in yet. Scanning the QR code or tapping "Check-in" from the display, mobile app, or web dashboard will confirm that the space is in use and the display changes to red. 

To enable the "Check-In" button, navigate to the Space Management page and scroll down to Room Display and Display Scheduling. Once you've enabled the "Check-in" button, the next step is to think about how far in advance folks can confirm or check into meetings by setting a confirmation window. 

  • Set the meeting confirmation window

    • The default confirmation window is 2 hours to check-in for your meeting. You can customize the confirmation window for your organization under Manage > Organization > Event Customizations. Set a window that works best for your team, with a setting range from 10 minutes to 12 hours.

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Part 2: Enable the abandoned meeting protection setting

  • If you're not already on the space or building management page, log in to dashboard and navigate to the space or building you'd like to update.

  • Scroll to Display Scheduling for Abandoned Meeting Protection > toggle to Enable.

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Part 3: Set the abandoned threshold

Adjust the threshold and timing folks have to confirm or check-in before the meeting is automatically canceled. The default is 10 minutes, but choose the amount of time, in minutes, that works for your office (See above).

Additional setting (not required)

Strikes for recurring events

  • This feature requires teams to be running the recurring events feature. 

  • This feature aims at recovering free space from meetings long forgotten. Set the number of times a recurring meeting can consecutively go unattended before Robin clears it permanently from the schedule (see above).

What to expect 

Will events be deleted completely from the calendar?

In most cases, the event is removed from the space's calendar only, freeing the space up for others to use. Meeting organizers and attendees will still see the full meeting and its full duration on their calendars.

The only exception is when the space is the organizer of the event. This can happen when people book directly on the space's calendar and add themselves as an invitee, as is the case for some Microsoft users booking through Robin's web dashboard. Updating permissions to allow users to book as themselves will resolve this.

To avoid surprises, the event organizer will receive email notifications when their event is removed from the room's schedule. See the examples below. 

One-time event (non-recurring):

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A recurring meeting + organization has the strike rule enabled:

AMP_notification-recurring_strike.png

The notification will include how many strikes the organizer has left until the event is completely removed from the room calendar.  

A recurring meeting + hit the max strike threshold:

AMP_notfication-reg.png

Therefore all future reservations in the recurring meeting series are removed as well. 

 

Common Pitfalls

  • Make sure your booking user has read/write access on the room calendars. This is most critical for G Suite users and happens when the connected booking user doesn't have the right permissions to modify other people's events. If you see an error on your display when attempting to remove an abandoned meeting, this is why.
  • Meetings that are 8 hours or more in length, do not require confirmation, and will not remove the meeting if abandoned. If you create a meeting within your organization's meeting confirmation window (see above), Robin will automatically confirm the meeting and will not require check-in. 

 

Insights

The Robin dashboard provides an analytics section called "Recaptured time" under the Space Bookings tab. This section illustrates how much of that released time is used for ad hoc events. Check out the chart in the web dashboard to learn more!

Information about abandoned meetings can also be found in the dashboard exports. Look for the "Automatically unbooked at" column in the export.

 

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