You can copy a Connect Meeting Room (or Seminar Room) using the templates functionality, think of this as ‘cloning’ a room.

Here are some scenarios and some best practices you might want to consider.

Note – For the purposes of this post, you can consider ‘Meeting Rooms’ to be equally applicable to ‘Virtual Classrooms’ and ‘Seminar Rooms’.

How ‘Templates’ work in Connect
In your ‘Meetings’ tab and under ‘My Meetings’ there is a folder named ‘My Templates’.  Any Meeting Room in the ‘My Templates’ folder is available to you as a user to be ‘cloned’.

Under the ‘Shared Meetings’ section there is a ‘Shared Templates’ folder, any Meeting Rooms in the ‘Shared Templates’ folder are available to all users across your account to be ‘cloned’.  for the purposes of this post you can substitute the Shared Templates’ folder for the ‘My Templates’ folder if you want to make the templates available across your account vs. just available to yourself.

The process of ‘cloning’ a Meeting Room happens when you initially build your new room and you choose a template from the ‘Select Template’ menu.  You can only select the template when you initially build the room, you cannot change the template used after the room has been created.

Initially in your account you will see 3 templates available to you in the ‘Shared Templates’ folder as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

You can open these Meeting Rooms and see how the templates are set up for different meeting or classroom types.

Best Practice Tip – You can change the ‘Default Meeting Template’ room so that the default room for any user will be your own design.  I would recommend that you ‘clone’ the original ‘Default Meeting Template’ to ensure that you always have the original.  You can keep this room in a folder called ‘Archived Templates’ so that you can always go back to a clean copy.

Best Practice Tip – Try to avoid deleting templates from your account if possible, there seems to be a link between deleting templates and the corruption of ‘cloned’ rooms in the future.  Similarly if you can keep the content that is in a template room safely in a folder and avoid deleting it then this seems like a good best practice to maintain the function of your templates in the future.

What is ‘cloned’
When you select a template as you build the room, all of the layouts, uploaded content, whiteboard markups, branding and most of the settings will be copied to the new room.  Settings that will not be copied relate to security or personal configuration, such as room permissions and conference dial-in information.

Remember that the ‘state’ of the room is also preserved, so if you leave the template on a particular layout with a PPT on a particular slide, the new room will start on that layout and on that slide as well.

Best Practice Tip – If you want to have a message on how to use the room as the first thing seen by new users, or if you want training materials to be the first thing they see, leave the template room in that state and this will be preserved in the ‘cloned’ room.

Best Practice Tip – Personally, I do not leave Breakout Rooms pre-built in templates, this seems like an accident waiting to happen.  You can build a ‘Breakout Rooms’ layout and then you can use that to build/duplicate your Breakout Rooms very quickly in the final Meeting Room.

Scenario #1 – Copy an existing Meeting Room
If you have an existing Meeting Room and you want to create a copy you have a couple of options, depending on whether you want to keep the original room for future use:

1. From the list of meetings, click the check-box beside the meeting you want to copy, select ‘Move’ (Figure 2) and move the Meeting Room to the ‘My Templates’ folder (Figure 3).
2. In your ‘My Meetings’ area, build a new Meeting Room and select the original room from the ‘Select Template’ menu (your room will be in the ‘My Templates’ part of the list).
3. You can duplicate this process as often as you like to build new rooms.
4. If you want to keep the original room as well, complete the steps above but build the new room in the ‘My Templates’ folder and then move your original room back to ‘My Meetings’.

This process is exactly the same as Scenario #1 steps 2 and 3, but you do not have the option to move the Seminar Room to the ‘My Templates’ or ‘Shared Templates’ area.

1. In your ‘Seminars’ tab, go to ‘Seminar Rooms’ and to your license.  Build a new Seminar Room and select the room to be ‘cloned’ from the ‘Select Template’ menu.
2. You can duplicate this process as often as you like to build new Seminar Rooms.

As you cannot move a Seminar Room to another folder using the Connect Central interface, you technically cannot move the Seminar Room to the ‘My Templates’ folder and make it available for ‘cloning’.

It is possible to move a Seminar Room to the ‘My Templates’ folder using a Connect API call, but this is something you should ask of your reseller as this is not for the faint-hearted user, it requires understanding of the API.  For that reason I am not including that information in this post.  In this case, the simplest option is to rebuild the Seminar Room in the ‘My Templates’ folder.

Scenario #4 – Copy a Meeting Room, add content and then turn that room into a template
This scenario is relevant if your template is a generic room, a true ‘template’ where the layouts, branding and settings are in place and all you want to do is add your training content (for example).

Once you have added your content to create a ‘clean’ training room, you want to be able to build a clean room every week for every new class.  This would apply equally to a seminar that had similar content that was run on a regular basis etc.

1. In your ‘My Meetings’ area, build a new Meeting Room and select the original (generic template) room from the ‘Select Template’ menu (your room will be in the ‘My Templates’ part of the list).
2. Edit your new Meeting Room, add content etc.
3. Move your new ‘populated’ Meeting Room to the ‘My Templates’ folder as noted above.
4. Repeat step #1 above to build a new Meeting Room and select your ‘populated’ room as the room to be ‘cloned’.  You can create new Meeting Rooms in this manner as often as you like.

If you consider templates and ‘cloning’ in the same way it seems to create a more reliable set of Meeting Rooms.