Business case

Customers want to be able to organize events for the company from within the Workspace, without having to rely on external sources to manage attendance or manually send invites. These events should be easy and user-friendly to organize.

Though Announcements could be used to announce an event, it doesn’t provide options to manage attendance, and event organizers had to manually send invites for the event. Knowledge articles on the other hand are designed for sharing static information, whereas events are a type of dynamic information.

Neither of The Hub’s existing features offered a full-fledged solution to organize events. Therefore we expanded The Hub with Events, an easy and user-friendly way to organize events for the company from within the Workspace, with a direct integration to users’ calendars.

Events

It's possible to organise events from the Hub. You can indicate whether it is an online, physical or hybrid event, but also whether it is a paid or free event, display the number of available spots, manage attendees, and much more. Events could be used for e.g. webinars, training sessions, your annual staff outing, an online workshop, etc. Users can add the event to their Outlook calendar (and also remove it) and show their attendance.

Create event

You’ll notice that the process of creating a new event is very user-friendly with an intuitive design that simplifies the creation process. If you have sufficient permissions, easily follow four steps to create an event and you’re done.

Events can be created from the Hub:

There's various ways to create an event:

Click on the "Create" button at the top of your workspace, then select Event.
Click the plus icon from a Hub live tile set to Announcements.
From The Hub page
- From the Overview page, select "New", then select Event
- From the All events page, "New"
- From an Events category page, select "New" to create a new event that is automatically assigned to that category

Templates

When you create a new event, you will be prompted to select a template. By default, only the "Blank event" template is available. You can click "New template" to create a new template, or convert existing events to a template. Selecting a template will show a preview on the right side of the window.

Templates can be managed from the Manage Hub items screen (The Hub > Manage). From here, you can create new templates, or edit, duplicate, rename or delete existing templates. Users can be granted permissions to manage templates.

Delete event

The Manage Hub items window, accessible via the Manage button in The Hub; simply select and delete the event.

Update event (event status)

The Hub icon from the toolbar; go to the event and click on the pencil icon in the upper right corner.
The Manage Hub items window, accessible via the Manage button in The Hub: simply select and edit the event

You can filter events by three types of status. Only planned or published events can be edited and updated.

Planned: Define a start-/end date for the event and schedule the event weeks, or even months, in advance.
Published: The event has been published. You can however still edit and update the event details.
Archived: After the events ends, the event will be archived. Archived events are presented in read-only mode and cannot be edited. If a pinned event is archived, it is automatically unpinned.

Images & videos

Default placeholder

When no image or video has been uploaded, a default placeholder will be shown (it's not possible to change the default placeholder):

Image

Supported file types for images are PNG and JPG. There is no preference for either one.
The optimal resolution for images is 800 x 450 px.
There is no size limit. However, larger files may take longer to render. Recommended file size a maximum of 5 mb.

Video

You can use a Youtube or Vimeo video URL to add a video using the "Video" element.
There is no maximum resolution or file size for videos.

Permissions

A workspace administrator can assign permissions to, for example, a Communication Manager who is allowed to create new categories and events. This can be done from the Workspace admin settings page under 'Group management'. Or, if you want to limit the level of permissions, you can make this user a 'Category editor' or 'Category owner' who is then allowed to share information within a specific category.

For a more detailed explanation about permissions, please read the article: About the Hub.

Best practices

Hub live tile

The Hub live tile offers different layouts, default views and you can choose to add the live tile more than once to Workspace. For more information, go to the article: About the Hub.

Create multiple events in advance

If you already know that events are going to take place (perhaps recurring events?), you can create these events in advance. When someone signs up for the event, the event is immediately visible in their own Outlook calendar. Attendees will receive a reminder 24 hours prior to the event.

Don't worry if the event details may change in the meantime. You can easily edit the event from the Hub. These changes will be updated automatically in Outlook calendars of the attendees. It is optional to send an activity about these changes through the Activity Feed and notify the attendees of the event.

Notify your users prior to the event (show pop-up)

When the event has been created, you can choose to show a pop-up directly to the users to inform them. This pop-up is based on the "Publication start" date. So it doesn't matter if you created the event months ago, you can schedule the pop-up to inform the users, for example, two weeks prior to the event.