In this article we expect you have installed the Meeting Costs for Outlook Add In, and you have integrated Flowtrace platform with your Entra (Active Directry), and Outlook Calendars. You can follow the instructions for these steps from this, and this article instead.
You can find the configuration options shown below when you navigate to Settings -> Account Settings.
Basic configuration for Meeting Costs for Outlook Add On:
These basic controls define how you view the cost estimates on the add on. You can toggle to show quarterly estimate or not and toggle between currency format (£1500), or time format (75h 30min). Padding time is intended to account the time which is expected to be lost per every calendar event. This time is per participant and for a 2 people meeting of 25 minutes, the time estimate used for the estimate would be 60 minutes.
Settings for tooltip, and authentication are not applicable to Outlook Add On (as they are enabled by default).
Cost Estimate Limits and Color Coding
You can control when to show the estimates for your end users to limit their contextual load. Color coding is easy way to give visual feedback to meeting organizer about the cost of the meeting they are about to create.
You can configure same value for low, medium, and high to show alerts to most expensive meetings only. An option to alert meeting organizer about recurring meetings only controls those hidden and long running meeting costs.
Meeting Policy Configuration
Customize how you want your corporate meeting policy to appear in the Add On using custom header, content, and URL to your meeting policy documentation in intranet.
Meeting Policy Hints (invite validation rules)
We offer 5 types of invite validation rules for the meeting organizer. These rules are validated when user is clicking "Send", providing an option to them to review the policy prior to sending out their invites based on your corporate meeting policy.
You can individually turn on, or off the validation rules, and customize the hint text:
Validate the event based on start and end time (i.e. warn user about appointment conflicting a meeting free Friday on their local timezone)
Validate the event based on # participants
Validate the event based on # length of the meeting in minutes
Validate the event's HTML description field based on regex rule (great way to inspect HTML components, links to external agenda documents etc.)
Validate the event's text description field based on regex rule (great way to to inspect if the agenda is long enough or contains key information you expect to find from corporate calendars)
These rules are tested and validated at the send time to allow meeting organizer to consider if their meeting meets the corporate policy definition. They can still choose to send the invite as is because we don't want to block people conducting their work.
Contact Flowtrace support to discuss meeting validation rules, configuration, regex rules, and how to apply them to your meeting culture.
For any other questions or queries, please contact our support and we are happy to help.