As of 7.5.2, the Repeating checkbox is to identify that a meeting is a repeating event on the Product Maintenance screen, as highlighted below. This field is for informational purposes only and is read-only.
As of 7.5.2, you have the ability create a set of meetings that will occur over a period of time and this is known as a repeating meeting. The purpose of the repeating meeting functionality is to provide an efficient way to create meeting products in Personify360 that will occur on the same day and time over an extended period of time. For example, the American Professional Association conducts twice-a-week educational workshops on career development. In the past, staff users would have to manually create all these meetings by copying a meeting product on the Copy Product screen. Now, he/she can create a series of these meetings, which saves time.
You can create a repeating meeting for an existing meeting product on the Product Copy screen by checking the Repeating checkbox. Repeating meetings can only be created for parent meeting products. The only parent meeting products are M, COURSE, and EXAMPROCT.
As of 7.5.2, the Repeating checkbox is to identify that a meeting is a repeating event on the Product Maintenance screen, as highlighted below. This field is for informational purposes only and is read-only.
Changes made to a meeting that was created as a repeating meeting will not affect the other meetings in the set.
Repeating meeting functionality is NOT being implemented for sessions. However, if you have a meeting product with sessions, you can copy BOTH the meeting and the session(s).
Please note that you should NOT expect the following functionality from repeating meetings:
· Microsoft Outlook's recurring meeting “series” functionality.
· Location change will not propagate to all instances of the repeating meeting. For example, after a series of repeating meetings are created and the location changes, you cannot edit all the meetings in the series at once; you will have to manually edit each meeting. Due to this functionality, there are best practice recommendations for the volume of meetings that should be created at one time. See Best Practice Recommendations for the Number of Meetings to be Created on One Time for more information.
· Registrants cannot register for the entire meeting series; they have to register for each individual meeting in the series.
· This is NOT being implemented for sessions; however, if you have a meeting product with sessions, you can copy BOTH the meeting and the session(s).
In this section, the following topics are covered:
· Logic Behind Creating the Parent and Product Code for Repeating Meetings
· Best Practice Recommendations for the Number of Meetings to be Created at One Time
· How to Create a Repeating Meeting in Personify360
For a video demonstrating how to create a repeating meeting in Personify360, please refer to Video Demo: Creating a Repeating Meeting.
· Locating the Last Repeating Meeting in a Series
The following are some examples of when you may decide to use the repeating meetings functionality:
· Your association conducts twice-a-week support group meeting for families dealing with a specific health condition.
· Your association conducts weekly educational workshops on life skills, such as financial planning.
· Your association conducts monthly continuing education classes.
· Your association conducts weekly educational workshops for the public to increase public awareness of warning signs of a specific health condition, challenges faced by families dealing with the condition, and strategies for coping and managing the condition.
Personify360 supports a maximum of 24 characters for parent and product codes. Since it is possible to have the same meeting on the same day (e.g., in the morning and the evening or a half hour apart), start time is part of this code. Therefore, the formula that was implemented for a repeating meeting is the following:
· 1-13 characters from meeting being copied
When defining a formula for the first 13 characters of the PARENT_PRODUCT and PRODUCT_CODE, you do not have to use all 13 characters, but you should use enough characters that will make the code intuitive and easy to use. A common strategy is to break up the leading characters into groups that identify meaningful characteristics, such as branch, division, department, and/or group that owns the meeting followed by a small number of characters that identifies the type of meeting. The same leading characters will most likely be used for the series of repeating meetings (unless you manually change the leading characters), so before making a final decision, have users who will be searching for and entering registrations for the repeating meetings review the formula and give their feedback.
· yymmmddhhmm (11 characters)
o 2 digits to represent year
o 3 characters to represent three-letter code for month
o 2 digits to represent day
o 2 digits to represent start time hour in military time
o 2 digits to represent start time minutes (00-59)
For example, if you are creating a repeating meeting that occurs on the 14th of every month at 3:30 p.m., the product code calculation would be the following: STC Meeting 14AUG191630. STC Meeting represents the 1-13 characters from the meeting being copied and 14AUG191630 represents yymmmddhhmm.
When creating a repeating meeting, the first 13 characters from the meeting product code will be copied over to the Parent Product field. For example, if you are creating a repeating meeting for the following meeting: STCMeeting14AUG191630. STCMeeting14AU would be copied over to the Parent Product field. As a best practice, you should remove the unnecessary character. In the above example, 14AU would be removed from the field.
The repeating meetings functionality creates new meetings in batches of twenty at one time; this number is hard coded in the system and it cannot be changed. The number of years out that a repeating meeting can be created is determined by the value entered in the Maximum Years Out to Create Repeating Meetings field on the Org Unit Meeting Parameters screen at the organization unit level, as highlighted below. You can enter any whole value between 1 and 5. These are the only valid values that you can enter for this field. You can only create recurring meetings up to 5 years out, and in base, this field automatically defaults to 2 years out. See Defining Organization Unit Meeting Parameters for more information.
From a practical perspective, it is NOT a good idea to create meetings that far into the future (e.g., 5 years out), because the meeting may change time, location, date, be cancelled, etc., which will require the meeting to be manually updated. Once the meetings are created, changes MUST be done manually to each meeting. In addition, once the meetings are created, they can not be deleted; each must be manually made inactive. As a best practice, it is recommended that you only create meetings for 6-12 months out. In addition, it is recommended that you only create 6 months out for daily occurrences, 12 months out for weekly occurrences, and 2 years out for monthly occurrences.
How fast the meeting products are created is a function of your organization's network and hardware. On average, it takes about 1 minute to create 300 meetings with basic options. If you choose to copy images, questions, etc., then it depends on the number of images, size of the images, location of the application server, etc. for how long it will take to create the meeting.
In this section:
· Creating a Repeating Meeting
· Video Demo: Creating a Repeating Meeting
· Locating the Last Repeating Meeting in a Series
See also:
· Defining Organization Unit Meeting Parameters
· Defining General Product Information