Learn how to create and manage tracks and sessions as well as link Teams Live Events in OneVenue with this quick informative video!
Transcript:
In OneVenue, the Scheduler is your one-stop-shop for creating and managing sessions and being able to quickly find or change information during the conference. It's also the first page we see when we log in as an organizer!
This video is a deep-dive into the features of the scheduler, covering how to interpret items on the schedule, creating and managing tracks and sessions, as well as how to create and link a Teams Live Event into the platform. Feel free to pause, replay, or skip around this video and use it as a reference while working on your own conference. Let's begin!
This strip at the top shows us the month and days of the conference, per week. If your conference spans multiple weeks, you'll see buttons that allow you to skip forward a week or back a week. This conference is scheduled for August 1st through 5th, so only those days will show.
Clicking on the day allows us to see the events scheduled for that day. These sessions are filtered by the track, which you can select here. Events without a specific track selected in their visibility field will show no matter what track is selected.
Tracks are a way to curate a group of sessions intended for a particular audience. In the case of certification courses or online training, a track could be created for each certification path or training topic. When creating your conference, you can specify whether you want a track restricted conference, where attendees register for only one track, or an open conference where attendees can create their own schedule with sessions from any track. If you need help with this, please contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM).
We can add, edit, or remove tracks by clicking "Add/Edit Track" beside the dropdown. This dialog allows us to easily add a track, or remove it. We can also edit a track name by clicking the edit button, adjusting the name here, then clicking the checkmark button. Once done, click Save.
For each item on the schedule, we see a general overview. The name of the session is in the middle, with the scheduled time beside it, shown in both the conference time zone and the session timezone. You can see that with this social hour, which was booked in CST. We have buttons to edit the session, or delete it entirely, and you'll also see some information above the title which we'll touch on a bit later in this video.
To create an event, we'll click on “Add Scheduled Item” and select the type of event we want. Depending on the options enabled for your conference, you may not see some of these item types. Let's click “Add Session”.
On this dialog, we have several tabs. The general tab is where we enter basic information, such as the session title, start and end times, and a description for the session. We can also select the time zone for the session from a list of approved time zones for this conference. These are set up when your conference is created, so if you need help adding or modifying a time zone, please contact your CSM.
The audience tab allows us to further specify what type of session this is, who should see this session and who the intended audience is. The Session Type Label is a custom category that we can use to help sort our events. These labels and their associated colors can be set up in the Customization page on the top left.
The session type specifies how this session will be delivered. “Live Event” refers to a Teams Live Event— a session where you have one or more presenters who can share their video and screen, but the audience cannot. These sessions have a private chat for the producer and presenters, and allow the audience to interact with a moderated Q&A panel.
“Teams Meeting” is a regular collaborative meeting in Teams where anyone can share their screen or video, and everyone has a common chat area. “Breakout” utilizes Teams’ breakout room functionality to create several small rooms for smaller discussions, and “pinned” is used to create a non-time-specific session that gets pinned to the top of attendee's schedules. When creating a Teams Meeting or Breakout, OneVenue will handle the creation of the meeting in Teams and automatically integrate it into the platform.
Under session visibility we can specify if this is an event-wide (conference-level) session, or a track specific session. If we select track-specific, we can select the appropriate track below.
The speakers tab simply allows you to add the speakers for this session (these speakers are created on the Speakers page), and the links tab is where you would enter manually created links for sessions, surveys, or other things. The Join URL is used for Microsoft Teams links, Survey URL is for attendee survey links, and the activity URL is for any other external links.
Once complete, click Create Activity to create the session. Note that you can change any information after creation except for the session type. If you want to change a live event into a team meeting, for example, you would have to delete and re-create it. This is simply due to how the platform is integrated with Teams.
Notice that above the session title is a line of text that gives us some important details at a glance. For this general session, we see "Conference | ConferenceLevel | Live | Default". The first item is the Session Type Label, a custom field that we use to help sort events. The second item helps indicate what type of event it is; in this case, it says ConferenceLevel, which tells us this session is not track specific. By contrast, "Design - Day 1" down here says TrackLevel, which tells us it's locked to this track. Other item types, such as Trivia or Speed Networking will have their own labels. The third item indicates the type of event; in this case, a Teams Live Event. If this were a Teams Meeting, it would show up as Team. And finally, the last item is the language of the session. "Default" simply refers to the default language of the conference, usually English.
Finally, let's move over to Teams. Sometimes you may have live events that aren't scheduled from within the OneVenue platform but you want to give attendees access to them. In this example, I have the Teams Live Event session for "Design - Day 1". Let's select it and click this expansion icon. At the top of this dialog we can click "Get attendee link" and Teams will copy the audience invite to our clipboard. Moving back to the platform, we'll click Edit on the session, go to the Links tab, and paste it into the Join URL, then click Update Activity. Now, if we go into View Details and expand Session Level Event, we'll have a button that allows us to join the session.
This concludes our deep dive on the Scheduler. Keep in mind, your CSM is always ready and willing to help with configuring things on the platform. Don't be afraid to reach out if you need help!