Importing Meeting & Schedule Data

Overview

When you are importing meetings, the file could have the following columns. Please take note of any required(*) fields. 

• Meeting ID - required only when updating meetings. Should be left blank for new meetings).
• Subject* - name/title of the meeting.
• Start Date*
• Start Time*
• End Date
• End Time - should be later than the start time. 
• Description - any meeting notes can go here.
• Location
• Organizer* - only 1 value should be provided in this field, can be the name and/or email address of the organizing attendee, or the name of the organizing exhibitor. If multiple values are given, the meeting will not be loaded into the system.
• Confirmed - all confirmed attending parties. Separate multiple entries with semicolons (example: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; Exhibitor 1).
• Pending - all undecided parties. Separate multiple entries with semicolons.

Helpful hints / Things to remember:

• Please make sure you are importing a file with the extension .csv.
• After you import the file, you will receive an email shortly after the meetings have been uploaded into the system. If any meetings were not uploaded, you will receive an attachment named error_rows.csv, listing affected entries and specific errors.
• Some common reasons why meetings will be rejected are as follows:
  1. Not providing all the required columns (subject, start date, start time, organizer).
  2. Providing more than 1 organizer for a meeting.
  3. Providing an organizer that is not present in the conference.
  4. Not separating multiple values with semicolons within the confirmed and pending columns; unless separated correctly, the system will read them as a single item.
  5. Meeting “end date” being earlier than the “start date."

Functionality of Organizer and Confirmed columns: If a valid exhibitor name is provided in the “Organizer” column, the system will check if the exhibitor has any contacts and add the contacts to the meeting with a state of “confirmed,” provided none of the contact email addresses are already listed in the “Confirmed” column. If one of the contacts’ email address is mentioned in the “Confirmed” column, only that particular contact will be assigned to the meeting with a state of “confirmed”. The same rule applies for exhibitor names provided in the “Confirmed” column.

For example...

We have exhibitor Ex1 with contacts [e-mail] and [e-mail]. We have an attendee, [e-mail], with whom the exhibitor wants to setup a meeting:

Organizer	Confirmed
Ex1	[e-mail]

Both contacts [e-mail] or [e-mail] will also be added to the meeting with a “confirmed” state, unless one of the two was already chosen:

Organizer	Confirmed
Ex1	[e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]

Sample files for upload may be found here: Meeting Sample

Exporting Meetings

After you are done importing, if you would like the update a few meetings, please make use of the “Export Meetings” button under the schedules - meetings in the admin section. 

You will receive a .csv file to your email within a few minutes, containing all meeting data in the system. Every meeting will have a value in the column “Meeting ID,” so you can update any information in this file (description for a meeting, organizer for a meeting etc) and re-import the file, and the system will automatically match any updates with existing meetings in the system based on Meeting ID.