Introduction to Meeting Rooms Management

Introduction to Meeting Rooms Management#

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Overview#

Meeting Room Management provides a unified view of meeting room usage and operational indicators across collaboration platforms, with a strong focus on analytics, visibility, and decision support. It enables organizations to understand how meeting rooms are actually used, identify under- or over-utilized spaces, and optimize workspace and real estate investment based on data rather than assumptions.

The feature aggregates meeting room data from Cisco Webex and Microsoft environments into consistent dashboards, combining usage trends, device status indicators, and contextual metadata in a single place.

Depending on configuration, some dashboard widgets may display data that is not restricted to the current hierarchy, particularly when based on globally visible reporter resources.

Rather than performing deep, real-time monitoring, Meeting Room Management emphasizes insight-driven analysis that supports planning, optimization, and long-term operational decisions.

Automated provisioning, templates, and configuration support consistent meeting room setup, while analytics on utilization, availability, and compliance help organizations improve room readiness and overall meeting room experience.

Meeting room data refers to aggregated usage, participation, and device information for meetings held in physical collaboration spaces using Microsoft Teams Rooms or Cisco Webex meeting room devices. This data is used primarily for utilization analysis, trend reporting, and contextual insight rather than detailed call-by-call troubleshooting.

Supported meeting room environments#

Meeting Room Management supports spaces equipped with collaboration devices, including:

Meeting rooms with tables, chairs, and video devices
Cisco room devices (room bars, room kits, desk and standalone devices)
Peripheral equipment such as:
- Touch controllers
- Displays
- Microphones

Cisco devices may be registered to:

Cisco Webex
Microsoft Teams (MTR certified and Teams enabled devices)

The VOSS platform supports mixed environments, presenting a consistent user experience regardless of the underlying vendor. Data is collected using a lightweight, scheduled data collection process. For Webex environments, default workspace metrics data collection and scheduling are automatically created when Meeting Rooms Management is enabled, reducing the need for manual configuration.

The scheduled data collection process:

Pulls data from multiple sources such as:
- Cisco Webex Control Hub
- Microsoft services
Aggregates and normalizes data into shared data models
Ensures dashboards remain consistent, even in multi-vendor environments

This multi-vendor support enables consistent analytics and reporting across meeting room estates, even in environments that span different collaboration platforms.

Hierarchy awareness#

Meeting room data collected from Arbitrator and synced in to VOSS for each Webex account is tagged with the relevant participant’s (user) and workspace hierarchy paths so that you can view this data on meeting rooms dashboards in the context of the meeting ID and customer’s business hierarchy.

Hierarchy awareness allows usage and utilization trends to be analyzed in a business and geographic context, supporting data-driven decisions around workspace planning and investment.

MS Graph room hierarchy alignment

In Microsoft environments, meeting rooms (device/msgraph/Room) are automatically moved and aligned with their associated Microsoft users during provisioning operations such as Easy Overbuild and related workflows.

Rooms are matched to users by comparing the room email address with the user principal name (UPN).
When Microsoft users are moved to a site level, any associated rooms are automatically moved to the same hierarchy level.

This ensures consistent hierarchy structure and accurate reporting.

Important

While meeting room data is typically filtered and displayed according to the hierarchy from which the dashboards are accessed, certain Insights reporter resources can be configured to be visible across all hierarchy levels. When this option is enabled, hierarchy filtering is not applied, allowing data that is defined at higher levels (for example, system-level resources) to be accessed and visualized from any point in the hierarchy. This is particularly useful for global datasets that need to be shared consistently across an entire organization.

Insights reporter resources#

Insights reporter resources are used internally to support the collection and visualization of meeting room analytics in dashboards.

Some Webex meeting room dashboard widgets allow for the selection of Insights reporter resources (via the data/ReporterResource model) to support analytics and operational insight for the following Webex meetings data from the Arbitrator system:

Webex CDR
Webex Meetings
Webex Meeting Participants
Webex Meetings QoS

Insights reporter resources refer to the framework (via the data/ReporterResource model) that enables the collection, synchronization, and visualization of data in the dashboards. These resources support trend tracking and customized reporting on widget data. The model enables access to resource data in VOSS dashboards, facilitating the integration of data between Insights and VOSS so that dashboards may accurately reflect data.

In VOSS it is also possible to add custom fields to reporter resources to allow further refinement of analytic data.

Reporter resources can also be configured to be visible at lower hierarchy levels. When this option is enabled, the resource is not restricted by hierarchy filters and can be queried and displayed across all levels of the hierarchy. This enables dashboards to surface globally defined data, even when viewed from lower levels in the hierarchy.

Data collection and display for Webex#

When Arbitrator is integrated with the VOSS platform for Webex, Webex meeting room data that displays on the VOSS dashboards comes from both the VOSS core platform and from the Arbitrator. This means Arbitrator doesn’t need to collect all Webex meeting room data since some of the data is obtained via the VOSS platform API, specifically, data for people (users), workspaces, workspace locations, roles, licenses, and devices.

Arbitrator obtains the latest Webex meeting data via the Arbitrator’s Webex API resource to present the data in dashboard widgets. For example:

Webex_meeting_qualities resource: Shows for example, meeting title, meeting join time, masked local IP, masked public IP, video mesh cluster, video mesh server
Webex_locations resource: Shows for example, address, latitude, longitude
Webex_meetings resource: Shows for example, host user ID, whether the meeting call is enabled for chat, closed captions, recordings, transcriptions, or polls, and whether registration is required the host has chat, count

Note

Each resource represents an object in Arbitrator. A resource has associated data. A dashboard widget is set up to define the data to display on a dashboard. The data may come from various sources, including, for example, data from CDRs imported to a directory, data collected by probes, or data synced from VOSS. Regardless of the source, the system processes the data and populates the appropriate database tables.

The data collection model is optimized for analytics and reporting at scale, rather than continuous deep monitoring of individual meeting quality events.

It will still be possible to manually configure Arbitrator to collect all Webex data from the Webex API.

Manually configure Webex data collection on Arbitrator:

Log in to Arbitrator.
Go to Archive Management> Configuration Management
Configure a Webex tenant for data collection from the VOSS device (data collected via API).
Configure a Webex tenant for manual data collection.

Calendar integration#

The Meeting Rooms Management feature supports calendar integration to fetch, store, and display correlated and enriched Microsoft Teams Room and/or Cisco Webex Workspace calendar event data (via Microsoft Graph API), provided that the following prerequisites are in place:

Depending on your UC environment (Microsoft and/or Cisco Webex), Microsoft and/or Webex tenant set up
Exchange calendar integration is enabled
The Calendars.ReadBasic.All permission is assigned

Event data includes details such as:

Event location (meeting room name, and the floor a meeting room is on, if available)
Event start and end date and time, timezone, and duration
Event subject
Event organizer’s name and email address
Event participants (who joined and who left the meeting)
Cancellation state (whether the event occurs or is cancelled)
Whether the room actually joined the call (an event may be scheduled and then not occur)

Synced in event data is correlated across UC vendors and enriched for display on the dashboards.

Enable meeting room management#

Enabling Meeting Rooms Management provides access to several management dashboards that provide an overview of meeting room data, including summarized metrics and the ability to drill into the details of meeting room calls and devices via a range of analytics counters, list views of your meeting rooms/device inventory, meeting room usage details, device firmware versions (to easily see non-compliant versions), alerting and contextual notifications, all correlated and enriched with UC vendor data for additional context.

To enable and use Meeting Rooms Management functionality:

Configure the Microsoft tenant
Configure the Webex tenant
Configure an Arbitrator with tenants and assign to the VOSS core platform
Enable Meeting Rooms Management in the Global Settings (Enabled Solutions tab). This setting is disabled by default.

Note

When setting Enable Meeting Rooms Solution to Yes (True), you’ll need to log out and log in again to update the menus with the relevant management screens and dashboards.
Run a full sync once all requirements are set up so that data can start displaying on the dashboards. See Sync scheduling