8 Reasons to Maximize Outlook with Meeting Room Manager
August 6, 2010
Used correctly, Microsoft Outlook® is a great centralized business tool to help people in your organization manage their time and information. It also serves to help them connect with colleagues, managers, and business prospects via written messages (i.e., email) and meetings through the Microsoft Outlook scheduling feature.
But what happens when you and others in your company start feeling like Microsoft's desktop calendar software is lacking? Particularly when an organization spans across multiple locations, booking meeting rooms and times can be a big hassle. And Outlook, for all of its charms, is not a dedicated room scheduling or calendar software.
This is where NetSimplicity's Meeting Room Manager steps in. Did you know that the majority of NetSimplicity's Meeting Room Manager (MRM) customers purchase the software to supplement existing Microsoft Outlook email and personal information management (PIM) systems?
1. Supreme visiblity
With Meeting Room Manager, you can see all activity via any web browser. If your organization is equipped with digital signage, you can also view schedules at every conference room door or reception area. With Outlook alone, you simply do not get that kind of clarity.
Why is visibility so important? Well, have you ever wanted to grab a room for an ad hoc meeting, but weren't sure if you were stepping on someone else's turf? You don't want to delay other people's meetings, or have your own interrupted. With MRM to supplement Microsoft Outlook scheduling, you can see up-to-date schedules both on the web and on LCD panels, so you can book a room on the spot.
And, because fully-qualified location and room names are automatically noted in the Outlook Meeting Request Location field and sent to all attendees, there will no longer be any confusion about where to go. Receptionists can see this information as well, so they can direct visitors to the right room.
2. Save time
How many hours per week do you spend just planning meetings? Probably quite a few! With just plain Microsoft Outlook or other desktop calendar software, the meeting planning process is lengthy and time-consuming, and meetings are often delayed. With MRM, the self-serve room and resource reservation capabilites translate to faster, seamless planning — giving employees more time to focus on other tasks that they probably enjoy more!
3. Maintain consistency
With support for both centralized and de-centralized scheduling processes, Meeting Room Manager adapts to an organization's business processes and allows it to remain consistent.
With extensive built-in customization tools, businesses can not only schedule meetings to adapt to the unique needs of particular meetings, they can institute company-wide norms that get used during every single scheduling process.
Consistency makes employees more comfortable with the scheduling software, and there will be fewer mixups and miscommunication, which reflects also externally. Clients will receive positive impressions of both your brand and your corporate operations.
4. People get hungry
It's a fact! Meetings can last a long time, and it's important that employees and clients remained nourished throughout the day. While there are plenty of automated or online catering request services, Meeting Room Manager is the only one that is tied to the meeting room schedule, so changes and cancellations to the meeting schedule are quickly communicated to the appropriate staff and everything remains synchronized. If your meeting is full-on cancelled, your service requests will be cancelled as well, so you will never be charged for services you don't need. Imagine being able to eliminate delivery errors!
5. People also need the right equipment
Have you ever been in a meeting and the presenter had technical difficulties? Perhaps they couldn't find the right plug to connect their laptop to the projector — or they needed a projector and there wasn't one in the room.
With Microsoft Outlook scheduling, there is no way to determine what services are available in selected rooms. To request a particular piece of equipment, you must submit a request manually or through another system, repeating details about your time and location from your desktop calendar software. If you change your meeting time or location, you must also remember to separately update other service providers, or else your equipment will not show up!
With MRM, all equipment requests are automatically routed to the appropriate providers. You can also see at a glance what services are available for each room you select for the meeting, and are able to select rooms accordingly.
6. Control access and permissions
Meeting Room Manager supports the hierarchal structure of your organization with multi-location resource management, granular-level permission rights, user priority groups, and wait list capabilities. MRM administrators have full control over the visibility and booking rights for meeting rooms, and can grant rights to view and book meeting rooms by location and user group. (User groups can also be synchronized with Microsoft Active Directory.)
On its own, Outlook cannot exercise this incredible level of control. You cannot automatically control visibility and access to meeting rooms by site and user group, and you cannot grant select user groups priority booking rights to override existing reservations. On top of that, there are no automated waitlists when multiple users request the same room. That's just too many "can't" and "not"s!
7. Track charges and costs
How much are meetings and service charges really costing your company? With MRM, you can set up automated tracking of room and service charges by meeting host, client, or project. This helps unify reporting on costs and ultimately help your company minimize those costs.
8. Centralize functionality on one user interface
With Meeting Room Manager's Enterprise edition, users can book meeting attendees and reserve a room in one simple process, and all from within their Microsoft Outlook interface. You can search for rooms based on customizable filters, such as large-capacity rooms and those with videoconferencing capabilities. And best of all, it's really easy to implement! It takes just under five minutes to install the plug-in, just a click from the MRM web user interface or a link from email or intranet.
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