MeetingMaxx was originally designed to support large, multi-day meetings. As such, meetings were given dates but not times. The times were on the events within the meetings (the opening keynote, the lunch, the coffee break, etc.) But as the association industry has changed, meeting offerings have expanded to include large numbers of 1-day seminars and workshops as well as online webinars that are only an hour or two.
In March 2012, MatrixMaxx 12.2 introduced times and time zone settings at the meeting level so that the meetings themselves could have start and end times associated with them. The most critical impact of this enhancement on the end-user was the ‘Add to Personal Calendar’ function on the WWW meeting view page. With this upgrade, the calendar function now includes times and time zones that will add onto the users calendar along with the date(s).
Here are some important details about how this upgrade works and how existing data was impacted:
Which parts of MatrixMaxx are impacted by the addition of Time Zones?
Although there are times throughout the MatrixMaxx system, the addition of time zones has been limited to certain modules, to reduce unnecessary complexity.
- MeetingMaxx
- Intranet Calendar
How many time zones are being supported?
The generic product implementation includes the 4 standard US timezones.
- We have the flex to up this zone list per implementation of MatrixMaxx.
- There are 24 standard zones, 40 main zones in practice, and more than that if you start to take into account nuances.
- Each organization who wants to add more time zones than the standard 4 US zones will need provide us with an explicit list of those that they want to use and we’ll implement it, providing it does not conflict in some way with the standard time-zone coding that we are using.
What about older meetings that do not have times?
For older legacy meetings that were created without times, a start time of 12:00AM indicates no start time and an end time of 11:59PM indicates no end time. Any meeting that has these values as a start and end time will not be pulled into time displays.
As for time zones on older meetings, they are not being set. Associations with active meetings at the time of the time zone upgrade were advised to edit these in-progress meetings and add time zones to them.