Room Properties: The Settings That Decide How a Meeting Room Tablet Behaves
Most people set a room up once, accept the defaults, and never open it again. That is usually fine. It is also why a lot of organisations run their whole estate as though every room were the same, when a boardroom and a two-person huddle room have almost nothing in common.
A room record carries a handful of settings. Four of them change how the room actually behaves in front of people: which days it is bookable, the hours within those days, how early somebody can claim a meeting, and how long an unclaimed meeting survives.
Below, we discuss what each one does, what it is worth having, and how to pick values that suit the room rather than the building.
What a Room Record Holds
A room is a meeting room mapped to exactly one resource calendar. That mapping is the whole point: it is how the platform learns which calendar a display should show.
The rest is description, and two pieces of it earn their place on the screen.
Capacity is the single most useful thing on a panel for somebody deciding whether to take the room. Four people standing in a corridor can see at a glance that the free room seats twelve and the one after it seats three. Fill it in.
Time zone fills itself in from the room mailbox and does more work than it looks. It defines the room's local day, which drives the agenda boundaries, the working hours and the clock on the panel. A room in another country shows that room's clock, not yours. If a mailbox has the wrong time zone, the panel's day is shifted and so are its hours, and the fix is the mailbox rather than a workaround here.
Building and floor are optional labels. Fill them in even with five rooms. They cost nothing now and they are the difference between a usable and an unusable list at fifty.
Working Hours: Days and Times
Working hours define when a room can be booked. Tick the days, set an opening and closing time, and outside that window a free room shows Closed in grey with no booking controls.
The important part is that this is enforced rather than merely displayed. The server refuses an out-of-hours booking or extension, so the panel never offers something that would then be declined. A refused booking leaves no trace in your calendar because the check runs before anything is written.
Three behaviours are worth knowing.
Empty means unrestricted, in every combination. No days ticked means every day. No times means all day. For a room that genuinely runs around the clock, leave it empty rather than setting midnight to midnight across seven days. It is the same thing and it is unambiguous to whoever reads the room next.
Occupied always outranks Closed. A meeting that is genuinely running out of hours shows red, not grey. The panel reports reality before it reports policy.
Working hours govern the walk-up path only. People can still book the room from Outlook or Google Calendar out of hours, and the panel will show that meeting normally. This is not a lock on the room. It is a rule about what the panel will offer.
There is one wrinkle depending on how you connected. Microsoft 365 rooms import their hours from the room mailbox and show them here read-only, so if the hours look wrong they are wrong in Exchange and that is where to fix them. Google Workspace rooms, and Microsoft rooms on a service account connection, are set here by you, because neither provider exposes an equivalent setting to import.
What it is worth. A room in an area that locks at seven should not be inviting a booking for eight. And a panel with a status light goes dark on a closed room rather than glowing green down an empty corridor all night, which is a small thing that people notice.
Check-In Lead Time and Auto-Cancel Period
These two are the ghost booking fix, they are Professional features, and they are set per room. They are also commonly described as one thing, which is wrong and worth correcting.
Check-in lead time is how many minutes before the start somebody may claim the room. Setting it to zero switches check-in off for that room entirely.
Auto-cancel period is how many minutes after the start an unclaimed meeting may survive before it is cancelled. Setting it to zero switches automatic cancellation off.
They are independent, and each does something different on its own. Check-in without auto-cancel is a courtesy signal: people claim rooms, you collect the data, nothing is taken away. Auto-cancel without check-in has nothing to measure and does nothing at all.
Four details make this fairer than it sounds.
The auto-cancel clock runs from the later of the meeting's start time and the moment the booking first appeared to the platform. A walk-up booking made at the panel for a meeting already under way is treated as checked in, because the person standing there is the check-in.
Choosing the Numbers
Lead time of about five minutes. Long enough for somebody arriving early to claim the room, short enough that they cannot claim it while the previous meeting is still running.
Auto-cancel of fifteen minutes to start. Too short is worse than none. Five minutes catches people held up in the previous meeting or waiting for a lift, and every one of those becomes a complaint. Ten to fifteen is where most organisations settle, and you can shorten it later if ghost bookings persist.
Turn check-in on before you turn auto-cancel on. Give it a fortnight. People get used to claiming rooms while nothing is being taken away, and you get evidence about how often rooms actually go unclaimed. Then switch on auto-cancel with a generous period.
There is one configuration that must be avoided, and it is the most damaging mistake available in the product. If a display is set to view-only, there are no buttons, so nobody can check in, so every meeting in that room will be released. Check the device's interactive mode before you enable auto-cancel anywhere, and leave both settings at zero for rooms with no display at all.
Two smaller traps. Recurring meetings are released one occurrence at a time, so a weekly stand-up nobody claims will be released every week. And auto-cancel deletes the meeting from the organiser's calendar, which is the point of the feature and the part nobody expects. Send one email before you switch it on, or your first released meeting arrives at the service desk as a data loss report.
One Account-Wide Setting That Shapes All of This
The booking slot, set once for the whole account at fifteen, thirty or sixty minutes, is the granularity of the panel's booking screen. It decides the start times offered and the lengths people can choose.
It also governs the opening and closing times you can pick in working hours, because those dropdowns step in the same increment. So set the booking slot before you configure hours, or the boundary you want may not be selectable.
Use fifteen or thirty. A sixty minute slot means somebody who wants the room for ten minutes has to take an hour, which is the wrong trade in a busy building and quietly undoes the thing you bought the panels for.
Three Rooms, Three Configurations
Take a manufacturer's head office with a boardroom, six meeting rooms and two huddle rooms.
The boardroom. Working hours set to weekdays, eight to six, because the floor is alarmed outside that. Check-in lead time of five minutes and auto-cancel switched off. Board and client meetings start late for legitimate reasons, the room is booked weeks ahead by people who will definitely turn up, and releasing it automatically would cause far more trouble than an occasional empty hour.
The six meeting rooms. No working hours, because the floor is open and people occasionally work late. Check-in at five minutes, auto-cancel at fifteen. These are the contested rooms, they are where the ghost bookings live, and they are the reason the panels were bought.
The two huddle rooms. No working hours, check-in at five minutes, auto-cancel at ten. Short bookings, high turnover, and somebody is always waiting for one. A tighter window is justified here precisely because the cost of being released is small: the next booking is fifteen minutes away, not a week away.
Same building, same plan, three different answers. That is the argument for the settings being per room rather than per account.
Room Settings Reference
Setting | Where it lives | What it does |
Resource calendar | Per room | The mapping. Picked from a live list of rooms after connection is established. |
Room name | Per room | Shown on the panel. Use the name people actually say |
Capacity | Per room | Shown on the panel. The most useful field for a passer-by |
Building and floor | Per room | Filtering for reports. Worth setting from day one |
Time zone | Per room, imported | Defines the room's local day, agenda and clock |
Working days and hours | Per room | When the panel will offer a booking. Empty means unrestricted |
Check-in lead time | Per room | Minutes before the start that somebody may claim. |
Auto-cancel period | Per room | Minutes after the start before an unclaimed meeting is released. |
Booking slot | Account-wide | Drives the booking screen and the hours dropdowns. Typically 15, 30, or 60 minutes. |
Wrapping Up
The defaults will run your estate perfectly well. What the per room settings buy you is the ability to stop treating a boardroom like a huddle room.
The manufacturer above ran everything identically for the first three months, with auto-cancel at ten minutes across all nine rooms. It worked, apart from the boardroom, which released a client meeting because the visitors were held up at reception and the person hosting them was downstairs collecting them. That single incident nearly got the whole feature switched off. Turning auto-cancel off for one room kept it running everywhere else.
Set the contested rooms tight, set the important rooms loose, and tell people what you have done before the first meeting disappears.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between check-in lead time and auto-cancel period?
Lead time is how early somebody may claim the room before the meeting starts. Auto-cancel is how long an unclaimed meeting survives after it starts. They are independent, and setting either to zero switches that half off.
What is a sensible auto-cancel period?
Fifteen minutes to begin with. Anything under about ten catches people who are simply held up, and each of those becomes a complaint rather than a reclaimed room.
Does auto-cancel really delete the meeting?
Yes. The event is removed from the room's calendar and the booking is recorded as a no-show. Tell your users before you switch it on.
Can different rooms have different settings?
Yes, and they should. Check-in, auto-cancel and working hours are all per room, so a boardroom can behave completely differently from a huddle room.
Why can I not edit working hours on our Microsoft rooms?
They are imported from the room mailbox and shown read-only. Change them in Exchange and re-pick the room's calendar. Google rooms, and Microsoft rooms on a service account connection, are set by you instead.
What does leaving working hours empty do?
Nothing is restricted. No days ticked means every day, no times means all day. That is the right setting for a room that is genuinely available around the clock.
Can people still book out of hours from Outlook?
Yes. Working hours govern what the panel offers, not what your calendar system permits. Such a meeting still shows on the panel normally.
Why can I not pick the opening time I want?
The hours dropdowns step in your account's booking slot. Move from sixty minutes to fifteen or thirty and the finer boundaries come back.
