FAQ and common meetings@inspirometer issues

The most common issue that you are likely to encounter is that you (as the organiser) are the only person who receives the option to give feedback. There are a number of potential reasons for this, which is why we recommend you try out the meeting/feedback with a few friends first, so that you are able to see which might apply to your system. The issues are relatively easy to fix, so please do not worry.

The most common causes of malfunction are:

Adding meetings@inspirometer.com (or other people) to an existing meeting, and failing to send the update to all attendees.

When you change attendees at a meeting, and then click to send the update, Outlook will present you with the dialogue box on the right, with the top option selected by default. Unfortunately, this means that Inspirometer will receive this invite with only a partial list of attendee email addresses included. It will have no way of knowing this is only a partial list and so will set up only the addresses that it has been given.

If you are using Inspirometer feedback in your meetings, ensure that all updates are sent to all attendees, then Inspirometer can keep its information fully updated.

Forwarding existing meetings to meetings@inspirometer.com (if this does not work for your set-up)

Right-click forwarding of existing meetings to meetings@inspirometer.com does not always work. For instance it will not work if you are not linked to an exchange server, and it does not work with some versions of Outlook. It is therefore important to try out this method on a trial meeting to ensure it will work for you before you use it on a real meeting. If forwarding does not work for your set-up you will need to use the method described above for existing meetings.

Using an ‘Exchange Distribution Group’ as the attendee list. 

‘Exchange Distribution Groups’ may be set up in your exchange server for internal groups. They appear to be a standard email address (such as executive.team@company.com) but may be rendered as a name.

They differ from ‘Contact Groups’ in that they are stored in the Exchange server, and whereas Contact Groups (which are set up within individual Outlook accounts) resolve into their email addresses automatically when the invite is sent, exchange distribution groups need to be resolved into individual email addresses manually.

Any attempt by an email address outside of your exchange to contact the group is (usually) rejected by your exchange. And so Inspirometer has no way to send meeting data to these people, and because Inspirometer does not have the correct email addresses for the individuals, it cannot link the right accounts to the meeting either.

Resolving the exchange contact group is easy to do, but needs to be done manually by the meeting organiser before sending out the invite for Inspirometer to set up feedback. Simply right click the group name in the address bar, and select ‘Expand Contact Group’ – see on the right.  It is good practice to do this for all of the groups prior to sending the email so that you can be sure that the  actual user email addresses will be sent with your invite.

At a meeting by meeting level, this can be as easy as including or excluding meetings@inspirometer.com from the ‘To’ list in your meeting invitation.

However, Inspirometer’s Outlook add-in also provides options to change the type of feedback enabled, and whether this is reserved to purely internal staff, or whether it includes external attendees at the meeting (customers, suppliers etc.). Furthermore, these settings can be applied as a default across all of your meetings, or you can use a dialogue box to set these options on a meeting by meeting basis.

In most cases, the default feedback options will have been set by your administrator, but you can alter these by means of a dialogue box which can be enabled from within your Outlook settings (see the diagram on the right).

To access these settings (in Outlook 2010 or later, and providing you have the Inspirometer Outlook add-in installed and active) click on the File menu item(1), then the Inspirometer item (2), then select the checkbox beside ‘Show Feedback Options’ (3), and save your settings (4). In outlook 2007, Inspirometer settings has its own menu item at the top.

If you do this, next time you send a meeting invitation with meetings@inspirometer.com enabled, the dialogue box on the right will appear, and you will be able to choose the types of feedback which will be available to your attendees, and whether the same options will be available to external guests.

You can also save new default settings (and avoid having to complete the dialogue box each time) or you can revert to the default settings which have been set at an organisational level.

Incidentally, if you wish to prevent all feedback for a particular group in a meeting, clicking the active radio button will turn it off (similar to a check box).

It is not uncommon to decide at the last minute that you need to include somebody who has not been invited in the calendar invite. In training sessions it is almost the norm to find you have a last-minute replacement. How do you enable feedback for these people.

Please do not try to do it via an update to the calendar invite after the meeting’s scheduled start, because Inspirometer will ignore it, or it will replace the original meeting with a new one and risk losing any feedback data already gained. Furthermore there is a much easier way.

Go to you Inspirometer Dashboard, either on a laptop or on your mobile device, and find your current meeting in the list of upcoming meetings (1) it should be at the top. Click the Edit button (2) beside this meeting, and in the pop-up box which appears, click the Add New Attendee button (3). You can do this multiple times, and you can delete attendees who did not turn up.

It is not good for meetings to over-run, but sometimes it cannot be helped. Feedback is deliberately set to remain open for 30 minutes after the scheduled end of a meeting to accommodate this occurrence.

But what happens if the overrun is 30 minutes or longer?

Please do not try to do it via an update to the calendar invite after the meeting’s scheduled start, because Inspirometer will ignore it, or it will replace the original meeting with a new one and risk losing any feedback data already gained. But you are able to adjust the end time of your meetings directly from your Inspirometer dashboard.

To do this, go to you Inspirometer Dashboard, either on a laptop or on your mobile device, and find your current meeting in the list of upcoming meetings (1) it should be at the top. Click the Edit button (2) beside this meeting, and in the pop-up box which appears, change the value in the ‘End Time’ field (3). (If it’s really late, you can even change the date.)

By default, only the meeting organiser can see the feedback results to their meeting.

If the organiser chooses to share the feedback results with the meeting members, they can do this in two ways.

The first and most obvious solution is to access their Inspirometer dashboard on their laptop, and present the results page from the meeting onto a screen.

Alternatively, Inspirometer provides the means to share the results of the meeting directly with meeting attendees, either selectively or all together.  To do this, open the meeting feedback page and click on the Results tab (1). Then click on the Share Report button (2).

This will open up a dialogue box listing attendees with whom the report is already shared. If you have not already shared the report, it will read None Selected (3). Clicking in this field will open a further pop-up, where the organiser can select who should see the report – either everyone (4a) or selected individuals (4b).

Clicking the second Share Report button will enact this. Once shared, the results will be available to the attendees through their own meeting stats page after the meeting has finished.

Attendees need to have their own account to access reports in this way. Where an attendee does not have an account, the sharing pop-up will list (NO ACCOUNT) against their email, and these entries are not selectable.

There are two ways to see individual meeting feedback after the meeting has finished.

For up to a week after the end of the meeting, the meeting will be listed in the ‘Recent Meetings’ section of your Dashboard, and you will be able to click on the ‘Report’ button beside the meeting entry to view the results exactly as they appeared via the Results tab of the meeting feedback pages.

If no report button is available beside a meeting, then either there is no meeting feedback set up, or the organiser has not shared the report. Hovering over the ‘Not Shared’ button will show you the organiser’s email address so that they can be contacted to share the results (if they are willing).

Outlook has a clear and straightforward definition as to what is a meeting and what is an appointment. Basically, if you invite people to it, it is a meeting. You can see this by opening up calendar items and looking at the header bar – wherever people are invited it says meeting, and where they are not it says appointment. By default, Inspirometer accepts this basic premise also.

However, some organisations follow convenient practices which fall outside of this, such as inviting people to their ‘vacation’ as a way of notifying people of their future absence, or putting an appointment into the calendar for a meeting to which no calendar invite has been issued (not all meeting organisers use calendars to schedule meetings). How can we ensure that these are reflected (or ignored) accurately in your meeting stats?

Inspirometer’s Outlook add-in also provides a way of recognising certain key terms in the subject field of an Outlook calendar item. To understand more about this, take a look at the item on ‘Are your Inspirometer settings configured to allocate events correctly?‘ in the page on ‘Refining your Calendar Data’

There are a number of potential reasons for this. One of which we covered in respect of “Why am I the only one able to give feedback in my meeting?” (see above). However, even if you have set the meeting up entirely correctly, emails (and feedback requests) can be blocked for the following reasons:

Emails and feedback requests going into spam filters/folders

Our feedback requests necessarily have multiple images and hyperlinks within them to enable single click feedback. This is also symptomatic of spam emails, and some spam engines automatically reroute highly hyperlinked emails from ‘unknown’ sources into spam folders (either on the users machine, or in the corporate exchange). On some systems, this can subsequently affect other un-hyperlinked emails from the same source.

The solution lies in making sure inspirometer.com is a known source by getting the domain whitelisted in your mail system. Until this is done, please check your spam folders for missing emails, and please ask your attendees to do the same.

Group settings in which feedback has been switched off

If the meeting organiser’s Inspirometer account is part of an organisation, and if feedback emails are not received, by some or all people, but not for the reasons listed above, the ‘problem’ may be the settings that have been set at the organisation level. To support a phased implementation of the tool, Inspirometer provides the option for the organisation to choose under which circumstances feedback requests are used.

They do this in a panel like the one on the right.

Depending on the settings, this can prevent email feedback requests going to internal and/or external people even when meetings@inspirometer.com is included in the invitation.

If you suspect this to be the case, please speak to the person in charge of your Inspirometer implementation to confirm that the settings are correct. They will be able to adjust the settings for your particular area separately to the rest of the organisation.  You can change these settings at a personal level yourself – see ‘How do I change when feedback occurs, and who gets it?’ above.

The Agenda content of your invite has not been set correctly

If your people are receiving end-of-meeting feedback emails, but not in-meeting ones, it could be because of the settings described in the section above, or it could simply be that Inspirometer failed to recognise that you had included an agenda in your meeting invitation. Agendas are required to enable in meeting feedback (even if they are only one item long) and they need to be in a form that Inspirometer can recognise.

The format for including an agenda is very simple, and can be found in the guidance on in-meeting-feedback.

Meetings removed from your calendar do not delete automatically

Deleting a calendar entry from your calendar does not delete it from your record of uploaded meetings. The reasons for this are two fold.

The first reason concerns archiving of calendar events. This removes the record of your meeting in your calendar, even though you attended the meeting. The second reason concerns recurring meetings scheduled into the future. When the reason for the regular meeting stops, people delete the series from their calendar, but the way that Outlook handles this is to delete not only the future meetings but also the past ones as well.

In either case, if Inspirometer were to delete past meetings automatically when they disappear from your calendar in this way, you would risk losing important data regarding your meeting stats and feedback.

How to remove erroneous meeting data

There are two reasons to remove meeting data from Inspirometer. The first concerns sensitive information which has been uploaded in the meeting subject, objective or agenda, which you wish to remove. This can be done either by changing the data in you calendar, or by marking the meeting with a privacy identifier (including the padlock symbol available in Outlook). Once the change has been made, you will need to refresh your meeting stats via the Outlook add-in. Then when you return to the data in your Inspirometer account you will see these details have been changed.

The second concerns the meeting itself being in error – meetings which appeared in your calendar but you did not attend. This can easily be dealt with using the ‘Manage my Data’ option in the left hand menu, and clicking in the green or blue box for the type of meeting in the left column of the table. Here you can select to remove the meeting from your data.