How to Properly Control Meeting Room Reservations Within Your Company

January 28, 2010  |   Posted in Our Blog   |   0 Comments   Tags: agendamentos, central de atendimento, lizard, meetings, reunião, reuniões, salas de reunião

I would say that, like myself, many of you have had some problem or another related to the use of meeting rooms within your company: somebody has reserved the same room as you at the same time, the projector you have requested was not available, the room was too small to accommodate all meeting participants, or there was no reservation under your name.

The reality is that meeting-room reservations management is not as simple as it seems. To begin with, of all companies I’ve known to this date, most have a larger need for meetings than the number of rooms available, mainly when there is also a need for projectors or conference-call equipment.

Besides, such companies do not use adequate software to manage meeting-room reservations. Some of them centralize this job in a secretary’s or a receptionist’s scheduler. Other use Microsoft’s Office Outlook, with many meeting-rooms created as users or resources shared. Others have teams of receptionists with notebooks recording scheduled meetings.

All of these forms of meeting scheduling are valid. Nonetheless, the software used to control meeting-room scheduling still lacks some essential qualities. Scheduling in Microsoft’s Outlook, for instance, allows users to reserve 2 or more meetings in the same room, causing conflicts. Besides, when the number of meeting rooms within the company is large, the independent control of several schedules becomes very complex, and requires a lot of effort to keep them organized.

Recently, MartTrend, a Brazilian software-products company, has created a meeting-room reservations solution which allows such scheduling control by a team of reservations desk attendants, who could be your receptionists, secretaries or even your users/employees who are allowed to alter the meeting-rooms schedules. This solution allows for better usage of meeting-rooms and gives managers the tool needed for centralizing and controlling reservations, all this done in web browsers through the Internet.

Aligning a good meeting-room scheduling web tool with a clear and company-wide disseminated reservations process may bring an end to meeting scheduling warfare within your organization.

I look forward to reading your comments on this post.

Success to all,

Henrique