Measuring Total Meeting Minute Usage on Your Account

In the past, keeping track of account-wide meeting usage was an arduous task at best. This made it particularly difficult for our customers to track just how much their system was being used and by implication, calculating any sort of ROI and for our on premise customers, doing any sort of hardware planning for the future. However, with the enhanced reporting capabilities in Connect Pro 7, you can gather this data in just a few clicks. Before we get started, its important to note that you must be an Administrator on your account to access this information.

To begin, login to Connect Pro Central and click the Reports tab then click System Usage.

This takes you to step 1 of the Report Generation Wizard. In the dropdown change the report type to Full System Usage then click the Next button.

In step 2 of the wizard, you can optionally apply filters to the report. For example, if you wanted to see how many meeting minutes were used on your account for 2008, you can calculate this by setting a date filter as I have in the screenshot below. You could also filter on a specific group of users if you have set up groups in the system. Once you are satisfied with your filters, click Next to generate the report.

In the report, the total number of meeting minutes used on the account is listed in the area highlighted in yellow below. As you can see there is also other useful data in the report as well including how many users are on the system, how many distinct meeting rooms have been created, and more.

Putting This Data to Use
So now that you have calculated the number of meeting minutes used, what can you do with this information? Well here at Adobe, we use this information to track a few things. First off as a raw number, this metric can tell you a lot about how successful your implementation is. Is the number of meeting minutes growing? Are more and more people creating their own meeting rooms? Tracking this data can be key to understanding if you are providing the right kind of training to your users, communicating the value proposition correctly, or if you need to raise awareness about Connect Pro in your organization.

Another way that we use this data is by doing an ROI calculation that plots $ spent on travel vs. meeting minutes. Below is a chart that was produced by our Finanace team which shows very tangibly that as the number of meeting minutes has risen, the total expenses spent on travel has decreased significantly. Doing a calculation such as this can be a great way to justify and existing implementation or as a good reason for expanding your implementation in these rough economic times.

As you can see, Connect Pro can more than pay for itself with savings to the bottom line in a relatively short amount of time and in very tangible ways. You can find out more about the specifics of this data by reading this blog post.

What kind of use metrics do you measure and track in your organization? Let me know by leaving a comment below.