Device Settings: How The Meeting Room Tablet App Works

The room is the calendar. It decides what the display shows. The device is the physical unit on the wall. It decides how the display behaves, whether anyone can press anything, and whether you find out before the battery dies.

Almost every panel in a building is a device setting rather than a room configuration. A display that shows the right room but has no buttons. A light bar that never comes on. A tablet that went dark three weeks ago and nobody mentioned it, because a blank screen outside a meeting room does not look like a fault.

Below, we discuss the device settings for the meeting room tablet that matter, what each one is for, and the two misconfigurations that cause the most trouble.

Interactive Mode: Is This a Control or a Sign?

Every display can be set to interactive or view-only, independently of the room and independently of your plan.

Interactive means the panel accepts input: book, check in, extend, end. View-only means the display shows the room and its day with every action control removed.

View-only is the right answer more often than people expect. A screen in a lobby showing the boardroom's day is a sign. So is an overflow display in a corridor, or a panel in a reception area where visitors walk past. In all of those, buttons are an invitation to interfere with a room the person standing there has no business booking.

The trap. If a display is view-only and its room has auto-cancel switched on, there are no buttons, so nobody can check in, so every meeting in that room will be released. This is the single most damaging misconfiguration available in the product, and it looks like nothing is wrong until meetings start vanishing from people's calendars. Check interactive mode before you enable auto-cancel on any room.

Interactive mode is a Basic and Professional setting. On the Free plan the panel has no buttons at all regardless, because there is nothing to switch on.

That gives three separate gates on whether a panel shows controls, and it is worth knowing them in order, because "the buttons are missing" is one of the most common support questions. First the plan. Then interactive mode. Then working hours, since a room outside its hours shows Closed and offers no booking even on a fully interactive panel.

Platform: The Setting That Drives the Light

When a device record is created you choose its platform. It is not detected from the hardware.

The platform decides which driver runs the status light. Choose the entry that matches your panel model and the light bar works. Choose a generic entry and the display works perfectly while the light stays dark forever.

That is worth knowing because a dark light bar produces no other symptom. The room shows correctly, the panel is online, nothing is in an error state. If your light never comes on, that field is the first thing to check, and the fix is in the administration site rather than at the tablet.

The platform also gates the browser panel. A device record has to be created with the browser platform to pair from a browser at all, and a record created for a tablet will refuse a browser sign-in.

Confirm the light during installation by booking a two minute meeting and watching it go red. It is the only check that proves the platform value is right, and it takes less time than coming back with a ladder.

Battery Reporting and Low Battery Alerts

Panels installed with the meeting room tablet appreport their battery charge. The fleet list shows a percentage, a charging indication, or a dash.

Browser panels never report battery. Displays on an older build of the app do not report it either. Both show a dash permanently and are excluded from alerting.

An alert is sent when the charge is below your threshold, the display is not charging and not full, the reading is recent, your threshold is above zero.

Three things about this catch people out.

A tablet that has already died will not alert. This is deliberate. A dead panel stops reporting, its last reading goes stale, and it drops out of battery alerting and becomes an offline problem instead.

A threshold of zero is silent, not default. It is easy to type zero meaning "use the default". It means never alert. The default of twenty percent applies only when you have never set a value.

Set the threshold higher, around twenty five to thirty percent, for panels that are awkward to reach.

The Fleet List and What the Statuses Mean

Five statuses, and the differences matter.

Pending means the device record exists but no tablet has ever paired to it.

Online means the display has reported its status. Offline means it has not, which is a flat battery, a lost network, or a switched off tablet.

Suspended is not a display problem at all. It means the calendar connection behind the room was disconnected, so the display was taken out of service.

Disabled means somebody took it out of service deliberately. Its access is revoked immediately.

Disable, Delete, or Reactivate

Three actions and people reach for the wrong one.

Disable revokes access at once and is completely reversible. Reach for this first.

Delete removes the record entirely and is not reversible. A replacement has to be created and paired from scratch, and the old record's history goes with it. Use it only for a record you are certain you will never want again, such as one created by mistake.

Reactivate, if you are swapping a faulty tablet for a working one in the same room. Do not disable or delete the record. Generate a fresh activation code and pair the new tablet to the same device.

Naming, and Why It Matters

Name devices after the hardware or its location, not after the room.

The name of the device uniquely identifies the device in the list. Something like L3-EAST-TAB-04 survives a room rename, tells you where to walk, and still makes sense two reorganisations later. A device called "Boardroom" does none of those things the day the boardroom becomes a project space.

Device Settings Reference

Setting	Where	What it controls
Interactive mode	Device	Whether the panel accepts input, or is a sign
Platform	Device	Which status light driver runs. Not auto-detected
Device name	Device	Your label. Name the hardware, not the room
Room assignment	Device	Which room's calendar this panel shows
Low battery threshold	Account-wide Battery alert recipient	Percentage that triggers an alert.
Status	Device, read-only	Pending, Online, Offline, Suspended or Disabled
Disable and enable	Device	Reversible removal from service.

Wrapping Up

Device settings are quiet. Nothing on this page produces an error message, which is exactly why these are the settings that go wrong.

Take a government department with thirty rooms across two buildings. They rolled out carefully, set auto-cancel to twelve minutes everywhere, and then spent a fortnight fielding reports of meetings disappearing from four particular rooms. Those four had displays in a shared corridor that a previous administrator had set to view-only, correctly, because visitors walked past them. With no buttons, nobody could check in, so every booking in those rooms was released on schedule, every day. The panels were online. The rooms were mapped. Nothing was in an error state.

Before you switch on auto-cancel anywhere, filter the device list and confirm every panel on those rooms is interactive. It takes two minutes and it is the check nobody does.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

What does interactive mode do?

It decides whether a display accepts input from the panel directly or is a read-only sign. It is set per device, so a lobby screen can be view-only while the door panels take bookings.

Why does our panel have no buttons?

Three possible reasons, in order of likelihood: the Free plan has no buttons at all, interactive mode is off for that device, or the room is outside its working hours and showing Closed.

Why is our status light never on?

Almost always the platform value on the device record. The light driver is chosen from that field rather than detected from the hardware, so a generic entry leaves the display working and the light dark. A closed room turning its light off is correct, not a fault.

Why does one of our panels show a dash for battery?

It has never reported charge. Browser panels never do, and neither do displays on an older app build. A dash is not zero and never triggers an alert.

Why did we get no alert before a tablet died?

A panel that has already died stops reporting, so its reading goes stale and it drops out of battery alerting. It becomes an offline problem instead. Check the offline filter weekly.

Should I disable or delete a device?

Disable, almost always. It revokes access just as completely and you can undo it. Delete is permanent and takes the record's history with it.

How do I replace a broken tablet?

Do not disable or delete the record. Generate a fresh activation code and pair the new tablet to the same device. It keeps the room, name, settings and history, and your device count does not change.

What does Suspended mean?

The calendar connection behind that room was disconnected. The tablet is fine and still paired. Reconnect the calendar and the display returns by itself.