Buffer time
There are various situations where you may need time between meetings to prepare the room for the next use. However, it can occur that other employees are waiting outside for the next scheduled meeting, causing potential overlap or disruptions.
For example, when a combined room has been used as separate rooms, it takes some time to reconfigure it back into a combined space as the divider walls need to be repositioned. Another scenario is when you request the room to be cleaned from the catering service after each booking. Additionally, you may prefer a buffer period between bookings to account for any potential delays, ensuring that overlapping reservations do not cause issues.
To ensure sufficient time for preparing the room between meetings, the “Buffer Time” feature has been implemented.
In the Room profile settings, the “Buffer Time” option will appear only when the “Room needs approval” is enabled.
Once the buffer time is activated, two additional settings will be available: one to configure the buffer time before a booking and another for the buffer time after a booking. These buffer times will be factored into the approval process and will be considered when displaying bookings in the approval list. If a booking violates the configured buffer times, an error message will be displayed to indicate the conflict.
Note: Since buffer time can only be set up in the GoBright portal, Outlook will not recognize it when making a booking through Outlook which may allow the booking to be processed without accounting for the buffer time. Therefore, we recommend using the GoBright Add-in. Additionally, it’s advisable to use the Approvals feature to ensure that the booking is in line with the buffer time settings in the GoBright portal and that there are no conflicts.
Buffer time in Timeline
Buffer time is visible in the Timeline with transparent red stripes before and after the meeting depending on the buffer time setup.
If you try to drag and drop the meeting to another room, the buffer time is also shown:
Buffer time in combined rooms:
To use buffer time with combined rooms, you must activate the buffer time setting in the profile of the combined room itself. Please note that when using combined rooms, this setting needs to be enabled for all individual rooms within the combination, in addition to the combined room. This ensures there are no conflicts when there are booking meetings in the separate rooms.
It is important to know that if you set different buffer time in the profile of the combined room and a different time in the profile of each individual room, the portal will respect the longer buffer time set in these profiles.
For example, if you set the buffer time 20 minutes before the meeting starts in the individual room profile and 50 minutes buffer time for the profile of the combined room, you will be able to make a booking with a buffer time of 50 minutes in the individual rooms and in the combined room.