How do I create a meeting?

Sign Up offers many options for specifying the location, dates and times, and format of your meeting. Meetings may also be added to a UVACollab site's Calendar and send email reminders to meeting coordinators and participants who are signed up.

Go to Sign Up.

Select Sign Up from the Tool Menu in your site.

Select Add.

Enter a Title.

You will be taken to the Create New Meeting page where you can enter basic information for your meeting.

Enter a Title that will identify the meeting in the site’s list of meetings.  For accessibility, you should use meaningful text for the title.

Change organizer. (Optional)

By default, the meeting organizer is the person who creates the Sign Up event.  If there is more than one instructor or site administrator, you may select a different organizer in the Organizer drop-down menu.

Enter a location for the event.

Options for entering a location differ depending on whether or not your site has existing meetings in it.

Enter a location in a site with no meetings.

If you are creating a meeting in the site's Sign Up tool for the first time, type the location for the meeting in the box provided.

Select or enter a location in a site with previously created meetings.

If a meeting was previously created in this site's Sign Up tool, a Location drop-down menu will be available and pre-populated with locations used in past meetings for you to select.  Either:

  1. Select a location from the drop-down menu,
  2. Or select enter new location to access a text box where you can enter a new location.

Tip: If your event has no physical location, you might enter "Online" or the title or URL of a meeting session into the Location box.

Enter a Category. (Optional)

If you have multiple events in the Sign Up tool, they can be sorted by Category to group similar events.

Enter a Description of the meeting or event. (Optional)

Add Attachments. (Optional)

You may select the Add Attachments button to browse for and attach a file.  For example, if you would like your meeting participants to review a document before your meeting, you might add it as an attachment.

Enter Start and End Times.

In the Start Time and End Time boxes, enter the dates and times when the meeting will begin and end.

To set the dates, you can either type the day and year in the corresponding boxes and use the month drop-down menu to select the month or you can select the calendar icon to access a calendar where you select a date.

To set the meeting times, enter the hour and minutes in the corresponding boxes and select the AM/PM drop-down.

Select Meeting Frequency.

The options in the Meeting Frequency drop-down menu allow you to set up recurring meetings.  Selection of a meeting frequency other than Once Only will create a series of entries in the meetings table with the same name but different details, where any of the individual entries can be modified as necessary.

Select when to end a recurring meeting.

If you selected any Meeting Frequency other than Once Only, options will become available to indicate when to end the recurring meeting.

  1. By default, the meeting is set to End After a number of occurrences.  Type the number of meetings you want in the box provided.
  2. Alternatively, you can select to end the meeting after a certain date, then enter the desired date.

In the example pictured above, an instructor is creating an event for Office Hours.  The Meeting Frequency has been set to Weekly and the End After date is after the course's final exam, 11 December.

Select begin and end times for sign-up.

Next to Sign-up begins, enter the time at which the meeting should be open to allow potential participants to sign up for it.  Before then, participants will not have an active Sign Up button for a meeting timeslot.  The default is to allow participants to sign up for the meeting 6 Days before it begins.  To allow immediate sign-up, choose Start Now instead of Minutes, Hours, or Days from the drop-down menu for when Sign-up begins.

Next to Sign-up ends, enter the point relative to the meeting at which to close the sign-up process.  This blocks further sign up by participants, and also blocks cancellation of a meeting for which a participant has already signed up.  This period is measured in Minutes, Hours, or Days from the scheduled meeting end, allowing people to sign up even after the meeting has started, when that is appropriate.

Note: Sign-up begin and end times are not available for open meetings, for which no sign-up is required.

Take Attendance.

If you wish to take attendance for this meeting, select the Attendance will be taken check box.

Specify meeting availability.

  1. The Available To options determine who can sign up for the meeting. By checking the box next to any specific group(s) or roster(s) instead of the Current Site, you can limit sign-up to members of the selected group(s).
  2. Select Other Sites to expand a list of other sites in which you are an instructor or administrator, in which the Sign Up tool also appears.
  3. You can extend the sign-up offer to members of any of these additional site(s) by selecting the appropriate check box(es). You can select an entire additional site to make the sign-up available to all its members or select specific groups within the site to make it available to just those in the selected groups.

Choose Meeting Type.

The relevant options for each of the three meeting types appear when that meeting type is selected via its radio button. See What are Sign Up meeting types? for more information.

Note: Once a Sign Up event is published, you cannot change the Meeting Type by choosing to modify the meeting.

Open meeting

This option creates a single time slot for an event or meeting, serving as an announcement.

No attendance list is kept, so participants who plan to attend are not required to sign up.

Single slot

A single time slot is created, an attendance list is maintained, and the number of participants can be limited or unlimited. Participants are required to sign up in order to appear on the attendance list.

  1. If you select a Max # of Participants,
  2. Enter the number of participants allowed in the box provided.  The default is 10.

Multiple slots

You can create a meeting with multiple time slots that take place at regular intervals, or customize the time slots to create a meeting with slots at different times over several days.

  1. Number of slots available for sign-up:  Enter the number of individual time slots over which to divide the meeting time.  The default is 4.
  2. Number of participants per slot:  Enter the number of people who can sign up for each slot.  The default is 1.
  3. Estimate duration per time slot (min):  This figure, displayed in red, is calculated as a function of the total meeting time span and the number of slots available, and cannot be edited.  It allocates the available time across the slots.  For example, if the Number of slots is defined to be 4, and the start and end times of the meeting span two hours, the duration will be set to 30 minutes (120 minutes divided by 4).

    If you enter a number of slots that does not divide the period evenly, you will receive a warning message after you move to the next page in the sign-up creation process and the total time span will be automatically adjusted.  For example, if you select a time period that lasts 2 hours and enter 7 for the number of slots, the duration per time slot will be adjusted to 17 minutes.  Accordingly, the meeting time period is automatically changed to 1 hour 59 minutes.
  4. Alternatively, you can edit the automatically-created time slots by selecting Advanced user-defined timeslots, as described below.

Advanced user-defined timeslots

  1. Select the Advanced user-defined timeslots check box to be able to define a multiple-slot meeting as a set of irregular time slot choices.  Time slots can be set over several days at different times.
  2. Select the Create Timeslot(s) link that appears when the box is checked.
  3. Edit the Start and End Times and Max # of participants for each time slot as needed.
  4. Delete extraneous time slot(s) by clicking the red X icon (delete the timeslot).
  5. To create an additional time slot, select the Add a new timeslot link.
  6. If the Calendar tool was included in your site, the check box Yes, publish the meeting as multiple calendar events in the Calendar Tool if adjacent timeslots are more than two hours apart is automatically selected.  Deselect it if you do not want the adjacent time slots to display as separate calendar events.
  7. Select Continue to save the time slots you selected, or Cancel to exit without editing the timeslots.  You will then be returned to the Create New Meeting page.

Select Next.

Once you have selected your Meeting Type and time slots, select Next at the bottom of the page.

Review the Meeting Summary and select additional settings.

You will be taken to the Meeting Summary page where you can review the meeting settings, select notification and/or calendar preferences, and indicate whether to include a Wait List when available slots are filled or allow participants to add comments during sign-up.

Review basic settings.

The first half of the Meeting Summary page, pictured above, lists the details of the meeting, including its Title, Start Time, End Time, and Frequency.  Review these settings to make sure they are correct.

Modify display and notification settings as needed.

The second half of the Meeting Summary page includes options for displaying participants and receiving email notifications.

  1. Display Participant Names: By default, participants cannot see who else is signed up for the event.  Check the box to display names of participants to others.
  2. Meeting Coordinators: Select the coordinators (instructors or site administrators) to receive notifications, if enabled.
  3. Notifications of participant actions: For selected meeting coordinators to receive notifications, check the box, Yes, send an email notification to the selected meeting coordinators when a participant signs up or cancels an appointment.
  4. Announce Availability: Choose Yes, send an email notification to, then select whether you would like to notify All potential participants or just Selected meeting coordinators to send an email announcing that the meeting has been published.
  5. Default Notification setting: Choosing Yes will automatically check the box on the meeting page: Yes, send email to notify the related participant(s) about the changes that have been made.  This option sends an email notification to participants whom you add to the attendance list or remove from it.
  6. Other Default Settings: Select Show the other default settings, described below, to view additional meeting options.

Other Default Settings

Other settings include:

  1. Allow Wait List: Yes, add a Wait List option is selected by default.  When the time slots for the meeting are full, a Wait List will be kept, and participants can join the Wait List if this meeting is filled to capacity.  If an existing participant cancels their sign-up and their slot becomes available, the first person on the Wait List will be automatically signed up for that time slot and receive email notification to let them know.
  2. Allow Adding Comment: The option Yes, participant can add a comment during sign-up is selected by default.  This option presents participants with a text box where they can add a comment when they sign up for the event.
  3. User ID Input Mode: If you choose Yes, I want to use User ID input mode for adding participants, you will need to type in a participant's UVA computing id or a non-UVA participant's email address rather than choosing from a drop-down list of names when you manually add a participant to the event.  This may be useful for sites with many members where the drop-down list is very long.
  4. Auto Reminder: Yes, send email to remind attendee of the meeting, one day in advance is selected by default.
  5. Publish to Calendar: If a Calendar tool has been added to your site, Yes, publish the meeting to the Calendar tool is selected by default.  The event will appear on the calendar for site members, regardless of whether they are signed up to attend.
  6. Create groups for timeslots: Selecting Yes, create a group for each timeslot automatically generates groups in your site.  Groups will be created with titles containing SIGNUP, the name of the event, the slot number, and the event date.  For example, if a meeting that takes place on August 22, 2018 is titled Presentation and contains two groups, the group titles would be SIGNUP_Presentation -slot 1 _08/22/18, and SIGNUP_Presentation -slot 2 _08/22/18.
  7. Max # of time slots per participant: By default, each participant can only sign up for one time slot.  Select a number from the drop-down list to allow participants to sign up for more than one time slot.

Publish your meeting or go back edit its basic settings.

The publication options allow you to create the meeting and allow participants to select their own time slots or to assign participants to time slots immediately when publishing the meeting.

  1. Select Publish to publish the event and allow participants to select their own time slots.
  2. Select Assign Participants & Publish if you want to publish the event and manually assign participants. If you do not choose to assign participants at this time, you may do so later by viewing the Meeting Details and clicking the Add Participant link.
  3. Alternatively, if you want to make changes to the basic configuration of your meeting, select the Back button to go back to the Create New Meeting page.
  4. Or select Cancel to quit without creating the meeting.