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Finding an available meeting room is hard enough in busy offices. The task is often made exponentially harder when reserved rooms are left empty in favor of walking meetings, calls, or when the meeting is no longer useful and all attendees choose to skip.

The no-show (abandoned) meeting feature automatically releases a room when nobody shows up to a scheduled meeting, and the 3 Strikes Rule, now available Office 365 and Exchange, helps keep outdated recurring meetings from piling up in your conference rooms. This feature has been available for Google users since 2017.

Customize the number of consecutive missed meetings before the room is permanently released from the event's invitee list, freeing the space up for others.

This feature is available for all spaces running the Rooms app. Read more on enabling Abandoned Meeting Protection and the 3 Strikes rule for your account.

Need a spot to meet? Skip searching for a space and rely on Robin's recommendations for an available room nearby.

From the mobile app, tap to add a suggested space to an upcoming event, or continue with a search if you're looking for something specific. Either way, you'll be able to find and book a convenient room for your next meeting.

The role of office traffic control got a little easier today thanks to the ability to remove spaces from events.

Administrators in Robin will now see the option to remove space(s) which are added to events as invitees -- this should be the case for all events synced from external calendar systems, or those booked through Robin when impersonation is enabled for your team.

Add an optional message to the meeting organizer letting them know why the space was removed, such as the meeting space was too large for that particular event, maintenance, or prevention of potential scheduling conflicts. The organizer will receive an email alerting them to the change in meeting location along with any message the admin chooses to include.

Once the space is removed, the event organizer may move their meeting to a new space within their office using the plugin, or choose to take the meeting from a huddle area, desk, or offsite location.

As part of the recent map kiosk release, we've simplified the colors shown by default on maps and status boards. Available spaces will show as green, with all other spaces shown as a dark gray.

Availability colors on the room display and web dashboard (besides maps) will not change.

We're making this change for two reasons:

1. Accessibility. Red/green colors on the kiosk/map views are difficult to distinguish for folks with color blindness. While custom color themes might work for the web dashboard, Status Boards intentionally allow less customization to make sure they are always readable so we can continue to release new features quickly without breaking presentation for existing customers.
2. Easy to find free space. This change makes the maps easier to scan when adding more things like desks and points of interest. Too many colors at once makes it harder for people what’s free to use right now, and leads to a frustrating user experience.

Tap to see more details about the space's status

Select a space to drill into its current status, and see red, yellow, or green labels indicating if the space is free, or when the space is free next. Labels will continue to show for all rooms regardless of availability.

Why only show available rooms?

We've prioritized the green availability colors because the main job of status board is to help with "Which room can I use right now?" around the office. For the folks interesting in seeing detailed summaries of each room's current status, you can still select spaces on the map to browse more.

Need more of a firehose? Actively monitoring the day-to-day happenings of the office is generally a better job for the web dashboard.

Coming soon for all status board modes

Over the coming days, you will see changes to the scheduling status board mode as well as the maps in the web dashboard for consistency. Many of you shared concern about showing yellow and red on the boards, especially in offices where confirmations often got skipped and the yellow "booked" color would show up more often than the red "In Use".

Status Board now supports a new kiosk mode for organizations with maps. It's the first of several planned interactive modes for the status board, and is a great way to give everyone in your office a quick way to book any room by selecting it on a map.

As part of this change, we've also simplified the way colors work on the map, and now prioritize available spaces over everything else.

Enabling Kiosks

Kiosk mode doesn't require a new board board configuration -- you can use any any existing map board by selecting "Copy Kiosk Link" via Manage > Devices > Status Boards. Open in your browser on any touchscreen device and you're good to go.

You can also grab a link when first setting up your board.

Booking from the kiosk

Unlike regular map boards, kiosk mode allows you to book any room in the entire building (as long as it isn't admin-only) just like a room display. Like the room display, meetings are limited to "right now" to prevent visitors in your lobby from booking out the next few weeks of conference rooms.

Meetings booked from the kiosk will not be automatically confirmed, so you'll still need to hustle over to the room display to check in. Especially if your admins have abandoned meeting protection enabled.

Read more about how to set up a map kiosk using your existing map boards.

RSVPs! Recurring events! Check ins! August brought a host of improvements to the mobile app, making it easier to create and manage more kinds of events.

• RSVP to upcoming events, and check in to let others know when you're using the meeting room
• Create and manage recurring meetings in your office
• View space details for events happening in remote meeting rooms

Don't have the app yet? Download it here

The events export now provides greater detail into what's happening in your office. Use the exports to run your own custom analysis, or manage events in your workplace.

Event Status reports whether the meeting remained on the schedule or was canceled.

• Confirmed meetings were active on the resource calendars at the time the report was generated.
• Canceled indicates the meeting was canceled (either manually or automatically) at the time the report was generated.
• Resource declined means the resource calendar declined the event, likely due to conflicts, at the time the report was generated. These events may still be active on the organizer's calendar.

Checked In At shows when someone confirmed the event was happening as scheduled from the room display, dashboard, mobile app, or notification.

Automatically Unbooked At indicates whether the meeting was abandoned, and when Robin cancelled it do to no-shows.

Invited People counts the number of people invited to the meeting.

Attendees counts the number of people who did not RSVP "no" to the meeting invitation.

Administrators on pro plans and above may download the exports from the web dashboard. Here's how.

Calendar notifications are easy to miss when you're heads down -- or in another meeting. Make sure you get to your next event on time with meeting reminders via Slack.

Ten minutes before the start of your next event, Robin lets you know when and where you need to be. Meeting organizers can confirm the conference room right from the notification, then cruise on into the meeting without having to check in from the room display.

You can connect your Slack account and enable meeting reminders from the web dashboard. Here's how.

Want notifications in more places? Meeting reminders are also available from the mobile app, download it here.

Select the list of spaces to appear on each status board. For example, mount a board which lists available call rooms only, making it extra simple for your sales and accounts teams to find free space. Or, hide rooms which aren't ideal for meetings or have certain restrictions.

Admins have complete control over what spaces appear on screen, however your office chooses to slice it.

Learn more about setting up Status Boards for your office.

Upcoming events take center stage in the latest update to the Schedule.

Users now see their upcoming schedule first, which shines a laser focus on their day. Account admins will continue to see the office overview by default, for a bird's eye view of what's happening in their office.

Activities throughout the workday include more than just in-office meetings, and updates to the navigation on the Schedule pages anticipate future additions to this view.

Key Changes:

• New event views provide extra insight into busy vs light days and weeks ahead. Check out what's Upcoming, and the day, week, and month calendar views
• The "Next event" call-out shows key meeting details in line, like agenda and meeting integrations
• Access to the office overview is still available, just shifted slightly to the to the right.
• View more event details or take action on upcoming events (like editing the time) from the actions dropdown

Want to know more about upcoming events without visiting the web dashboard? Subscribe to event notifications for Slack or email.