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New procedures introduced for booking
Headquarters conference rooms

Beginning today (Friday Aug. 22), new procedures are in place for booking Headquarters conference rooms. Please read and follow these instructions. If you do not follow these instructions correctly, you will get an error message, and you may even lose your room reservation or your equipment reservation.

Two things you need to know to schedule meetings successfully
Headquarters conference rooms must be booked as resources

When booking meetings, all Headquarters conference rooms should now be scheduled as a Resource and should not be scheduled as "required." Booking a conference room the wrong way may result in losing your reservation.

When rooms are booked correctly as a Resource, the computer automatically and quickly accepts the reservation (unless the room is already reserved).

But if you book the room incorrectly (using the "required" field) the computer does not accept it. Instead, the computer sends a meeting request to the “in” box of the conference room, and that request needs to be manually accepted in order to reserve the time on the calendar. Sometimes that acceptance may be several hours from the time the request is sent. Meeting requests waiting in the “in” box do not hold the time slot on the calendar. If someone else books the room as a Resource for the same time and date, their meeting will be automatically booked.

In that situation, you won't get the room, even though you requested it first, because you entered the request incorrectly.

Starting now, if you book a meeting room as "required" you will receive an error message.

How to get IT assistance for equipment set-up for your meeting

Whenever you book any meeting that requires IT to set up any equipment – a video conference, a PolyCom speaker phone, or a laptop/projector – just book the meeting in Outlook as you would any regular meeting, but also invite the IT Assistance mailbox. You will find this name in the Global Address list along with all ITD employees.

You will add IT Assistance just as you would each person's name, in the "Required" field. This will send an e-mail to the IT Assistance mailbox, so the Tech Support team knows that you have equipment set-up requirements for that meeting. Specify what kind of equipment you need in the large, message area of the meeting appointment form. Also, type the name and phone number of the person responsible for the meeting, in case the technical support team has any questions. Please remember to reserve the video equipment in the districts when booking video conferences.

We had to devise this new method for requesting equipment setup, because Office 2007 does not support the color-coding system that we were using previously.

If you have any questions about these instructions, please contact the Service Desk at ext. 8175.

Del K. Ferris
IT Systems Technician, Sr.