What is a Meeting Room Booking System?

A meeting room booking system is a digital platform (or system) that makes it easy for employees to find, reserve, and manage meeting rooms and desks in a company’s workplace. Some also include features for requesting additional resources such as projectors, IT support, or catering.

Meeting room booking systems make it easier to support hybrid and flexible model workforces where workspace needs may routinely fluctuate.

These systems help prevent double bookings, often provide real-time availability, and integrate with employee’s calendars like Outlook®. They also prevent conflict and ensure better (and more cost-effective) office and room utilization.

How Does It Work?

A meeting room booking system gives employees an always-updated overview of available meeting rooms and other workspaces. Resource Central uses easy-to-follow color coding to help expedite finding a room.

Once a user chooses an open room, they can reserve the space in a few clicks – either in advance or on the spot. The user selects the time, location, and any required equipment.

Once the booking is complete, the system sends a confirmation and calendar invitation to any added invitees. It also blocks off the room for the designated time period to help prevent conflict and double bookings. A system like Resource Central also sends out notifications and reminders to personnel responsible for added services like catering or providing equipment.

Finally, a good meeting room booking solution includes check-in and automatically releases rooms in the event of no-shows. If you have integrated workplace sensors in place too, they’ll help communicate with the system to mark the room as available again if nobody shows or the meeting ends early.

Benefits of a Meeting Room Booking System

There are a lot of benefits to using a meeting room booking system. To name a few that we hear customers talk about the most:

• Prevents double bookings and misunderstandings
• Ensures that meetings start on time and can boost productivity
• Gets back hours formerly lost to administrative tasks or complex booking processes
• Improves workforce productivity by helping employees save time finding rooms, desks, or other resources, and makes it easier for them to plan, manage, and adjust spaces
• Optimize space usage via insights and data that shows which rooms are used the most or the least
• Helps leaders to adapt office design and layout, and resource consumption
• Works alongside existing technologies, like email or calendaring solutions. For example, Resource Central directly integrates with Outlook®, but also with Teams, Microsoft 365, and Exchange.
• Enable booking and meeting room management on the go

Bonus – Watch how using Resource Central can help reduce the amount of time spent on booking workspaces and resources, make it easier to book rooms while on the move, and consolidate management of other workplace processes and resources for added savings.

Key Features to Look for in a Meeting Room Booking System

Not every meeting room booking system is the same. See the table below for key features to look for when choosing a meeting room booking system.

Key feature	Value it provides
Real-time availability	See which rooms or desks are free right now, or will be soon, with always-updated availability that avoids conflict and expedites bookings.
Calendar integration	Eliminate wasted time with automatic synchronization of meetings and changes via Outlook® and Microsoft 365 integration.
Mobile access	Make it easy to find, book, and manage meeting rooms and other workspaces from mobile devices and on the go, making more of travel or commute times.
Secure access control	Keep workplaces secure or section off specific meeting rooms with configurable access to control that lets you restrict bookings to certain persons or rooms.
Reporting and analytics	Get actionable insights that help you make smarter decisions about office space, design, layout, and resource utilization to support your workforce and improve operational costs.

Best Practices for Implementation

When it comes to implementing a meeting room booking solution, two things are key: Clear booking policies and employee trainings. If you don’t have guidelines in place around how to use the system and book meeting rooms, processes will quickly get messy and create tension. Training is key to ensuring employees understand how to use the solution, allowing them to spend less time on workspace scheduling and more time on brainstorming sessions, developing new campaigns, or supporting customers. At Add-On Products, we have consultants dedicated to training the users of Resource Central to give you and your team the best start.

Get a Look Inside

Ready to explore what a meeting room booking system can do for your organization? Take the first step to faster meeting room bookings and set up a quick demo of Resource Central with our team, and find out how Resource Central transforms meeting and resource booking.