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Configuring Scheduling Rules

Just Attend has the ability to automatically schedule sessions directly from content submission approval making event organiser's lives easier.

How it works

In order to use the auto scheduling service, you must define your session rooms. When configured Just attend will use the conference date and time to begin scheduling sessions into rooms in the order they appear in your room list. When the first room is full, the next room is populated and so on until the conference is full.

When you approve a piece of content Just Attend will search for the next available slot after factoring in the session duration and room changeover time ("session buffer time") and then offer this slot to the session. On saving the approval, the session is scheduled on the agenda for this time. At this moment, the speaker is not notified of this, but it will be visible on the agenda for people to see.

Sessions can be moved rooms, days and times using the conference scheduler by the organiser if tweaks are needed.

Scheduling Rules

You might have times where a room(s) are not available for a session to take place. For example, break times, reserved VIP session slots etc. To reduce the amount of effort an organiser needs to spend adjusting the agenda, you can use scheduling rules to block out time slots in each room so that sessions are not auto scheduled at this time. In addition, you can also allow / block session tracks, sessions with a certain duration and sessions with a certain complexity.

Scheduling rules are located in the Conference Rooms section in the admin lounge.

Rule Types

There are 4 rule types you can choose from

  1. Session Category - Allow or block certain sessions categories being scheduled in this room. Default none selected: Allows all session categories
  2. Date - Allow or block sessions being scheduled on a certain date or date range
  3. Time - Allow or block sessions being scheduled at a certain time
  4. Duration - Allow or block sessions of a defined duration from being scheduled in this room

The order of the rules does not matter. Each rule is processed individually. 

Important - Multi Day Events

Automatic scheduling will begin at the conference start time and will continue until the conference end time. For multi-day conferences the end time will be on a different day to the conference start time. Therefore, you must create a time block running from the end of your last session on a given day until the first start time of a session on the following day to avoid sessions being scheduled outside of your daily conference opening hours.

Rule Labels

Rule labels allow for the organiser to easily identify the rule with a simple name. This name is displayed on the attendee agenda so you can clearly label your break periods. If no label is entered, this displays as 'blocked' on the agenda.

Room Change Over Time

The room change over time acts as a time buffer between sessions that the scheduler will adhere to. The default is 5 minutes. When set sessions will be scheduled with the configured gap.

Creating a Rule

To create a rule, go to the room you want to configure and click edit.

You can add as many rules as you want. Rules are saved when you press the Add Rule button.

To best explain creating the rules, the following example scenario will help.

Comms vNext begins on August 16th at 07:00am and Ends August 17th at 16:30. Between 07:00am 08:30am on both days, no sessions are running. Instead this time is used for conference registration and breakfast. The first sessions begin at 08:30am and will run continuously until 12:00pm when there will be 1 hours lunch. Sessions resume at 13:00 until 16:30. This repeats on both days of the conference. In addition, the Big Thompson room is reserved for sessions within the "Business" session category only. All other rooms allow any session category.

Here is how you would set this up

  1. Create a Category Allow Rule for Track Business in the Big Thompson Room
  2. Create a Time Block Rule labelled "Registration / Breakfast" between 07:00 and 08:30 on August 16th
  3. Create another Time Block Rule labelled "Lunch" between 12:00 and 13:00 on August 16th
  4. Add another Time Block Rule labelled "Closed" between 16:30 on August 16th to 06:59am on August 17th to stop sessions being scheduled during conference closed periods between days
  5. Now repeat steps 2 and 3, but this time choose August 17th
  6. Now repeat for the other rooms. As these will allow any session category, no category selection is required. Only the time blocks.

Once complete, you will see the time blocks on the conference scheduler