Pricing Tiers: All
Appointment Version: Single & Multiple
Enhancing Appointments with Virtual Meeting Rooms
The Virtual Meeting Rooms plugin is a supplemental feature for accounts that may be providing Services to their Customers in a virtual setting. Whether your business is temporarily connecting through virtual tools, or this is a standard way your business operates, the DaySmart Appointments scheduling system can support you.
When using GoToMeeting © for virtual meetings, Staff Members can now connect their DaySmart Appointments Staff Member profile to their other account and begin to automatically include a meeting room link on any new (or updated) Appointment.
We’ll review the setup of this plugin and how Staff Members and Customers can add meeting rooms to Appointments.
Enabling the Plugin
Please reach out to your Sales Representative to enable the Virtual Meeting Room plugin.
Note: If the plugin is already enabled in your account, please skip to the Updating Staff Member Profiles section to set up your account.
After it is enabled, update the plugin to select the Locations where this will be available. From the Locations dropdown, select the necessary options and click Update.
Usage Disclaimer
By enabling this integration, you agree to accept all liability and responsibility for all actions that may take place between the Scheduling Service and third-party meeting room sites. If at any time you wish to remove this plugin from your account,
repeat the above steps 1-3 and then:
Click the Location drop-down field.
Click None.
Click Update.
Configuring Virtual Meeting Room Service
To complete this feature's setup, you will need to choose the virtual meeting room service provider in use for your business.
Click Settings.
From the list of available services, click to choose the one utilized by your business:
GoToMeeting
By default, Customer-created Appointments will not automatically create a one-time virtual meeting room. However, you may set the option to Create room for Appointments created by Customer to Yes if you would like to allow this to occur.
Click Update.
If you are using the Multiple Appointments per Time Slot version of the scheduling system and offer more than one spot in each time slot, it is recommended that you do not enable the functionality to automatically create a one-time use virtual meeting room when Customers schedule an Appointment. This is due to the fact that each Appointment in the slot would have a separate virtual meeting room. If instead, all Customers should be joining the same virtual meeting room, a Staff Member should edit the Appointments after they are created to associate the correct virtual meeting room with each Appointment in the same time slot.
Note: The option to create virtual meeting rooms for Appointments created by Customers is currently only available in the Classic Customer View.
Adding Virtual Meeting Room Links to Customer Email Notifications
Now that your new plugin is configured, administrators will need to set up the following setting to include the virtual meeting room information in outgoing Customer email notifications.
Click Settings.
Click Notifications.
Locate the option to Include the virtual meeting room link in the Appointment notification emails and set it to Yes.
Click Update.
The following Customer email notifications will contain the virtual meeting room details along with the Appointment details:
Appointment Confirmation Email
Appointment Confirmed Email
Appointment Change Email
Appointment Reminder Email
All User-Defined Emails (1 – 10)
Updating Staff Member Profiles
Once the plugin is enabled in one or more Locations, Staff Members in those Locations can update their profile to connect their accounts and set their default room.
Please note that an administrator cannot set this up for another Staff Member. The individual will need to log in to their account to complete the setup.
To set up your own virtual meeting room account, complete the following setup steps:
Click Staff Members.
Click your profile link.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the Virtual Rooms section and click the Authorize and Choose Room
Based on the selected virtual room provider, you’ll be prompted to log in with the appropriate account. Check out the next section for the setup steps for GoToMeeting.
Connecting Your Account to GoToMeeting
After clicking the Authorize and Choose Room button, a popup window will display with a prompt to enter your GoToMeeting username. Click Next and enter the password for the account. Click the Sign in button to complete the connection.
A prompt will be presented to first-time users to allow the account connection. To proceed, click Allow. Otherwise, if you deny the connection, the window will close, and you will not have configured the account connection.
You will return to your profile window and be prompted to set your default meeting room link. Click the drop-down field and select from the list of available rooms. The options displayed are the Online Meeting Rooms for which you are the organizer in your GoToMeeting account.
Click Choose & Save.
Scheduling Appointments with a Virtual Meeting Room
Regardless of the virtual meeting service set up for your account, the Appointment scheduling process provides options for adding a virtual meeting room during the creation process. If your administrator has enabled rooms to create automatically for Appointments created by the Customer, the system will generate one-time use meeting rooms that match the date and time of the scheduled Appointment.
Creating an Appointment from Site Administration
For Staff Members and other administrators, you can select the type of meeting room created when reviewing and finalizing the Appointment. This can happen when creating a new or editing an existing Appointment.
To create an Appointment with a virtual meeting room:
Click on an open time on the Appointment calendar.
Complete the Customer information.
Click Next.
Complete the Appointment information.
Click Next.
On the Finalize page, locate the Virtual Meeting Room section and select from one of the options:
No meeting room
Use existing meeting room (will display the Staff Member’s default room)
Create a new meeting room
Click Finalize Appointment.
Once finalized, the calendar will update and display the newly created Appointment on the scheduled date and time. To help with identifying Appointments with virtual meeting rooms, an icon will display on the calendar grid.
At the time of the Appointment, the Staff Member may also click on the icon to launch the virtual meeting room.
Based on the other settings in your account, email notifications will be sent to the Customer and Staff Member of the Appointment. When your administrator has selected to include the virtual meeting room information in Customer emails, the link details will be included in the message's body.
Staff Members will also receive the info and can use that at the time of their Appointment or launch their virtual meeting room from either the calendar or the Appointment’s Summary page.
Editing an Appointment
Existing Appointments can be edited to have a virtual meeting room added or modified. Open the Appointment Summary from the calendar and click Edit Appointment. From the Appointment page, click Next to get to the Finalize page. On this page, repeat steps 6 and 7 from the above Creating an Appointment process above.
If you need to change the virtual meeting room associated with an existing Appointment, open the summary page, click Edit Appointment, and Next. In the Virtual Meeting Room section, click Remove Room and make a selection from one of the available options:
No meeting room
Use existing meeting room (will display the Staff Member’s default room)
Create a new meeting room
When complete, click Save. Email notifications will be sent as your account is configured to notify the Customer and/or Staff Member of the updated Appointment details.
Recurring Appointment Series
When creating or editing a recurring series of Appointments, the logged-in user is able to decide if a virtual meeting room is needed and, if it is, can use an online room or have a recurring series created within the user’s virtual meeting account. This will allow the same meeting link to be used for each instance of the recurring series.
Setting Meeting Passwords
You may decide that you want to require a password for meeting attendees to join the virtual meeting room. Depending on the service you are using, there are some different behaviors.
GoToMeeting Passwords
When you create a new virtual room, you can decide if you want the meeting to have a password. However, at the time of creation, you won’t establish the password. You will do this when you are launching the meeting at the designated date and time. When joining the meeting, you’ll set the password, and then the meeting can be started. Before the meeting, you should decide what your password will be and communicate it to the Customer attending the Appointment. For more information on this functionality, check out this password article in GoToMeeting’s knowledge base.
Frequently Asked Questions
I have an Appointment on the calendar that was created by a Customer, but I don't see the VR icon? What happened?
In some cases, a connection to the virtual meeting room service may have not been available when the Customer scheduled their Appointment. In order to not display an error to the Customer, the system will complete the Appointment as expected.
If the assigned Staff Member finds an Appointment where this icon is missing, simply edit the Appointment, choose to Create a new meeting room, and save the changes. The Customer will receive an email with the virtual meeting room link information for their future Appointment.