Rooms and access

Understand dedicated and shared rooms, control who enters locked rooms and how meeting zones work.

Rooms bring privacy to the office: a locked door works like a wall for anyone without access, including for proximity voice and video. This guide covers the administrator side: who can lock, how to grant access and what happens when someone knocks.

Room types

Each room's type comes from the workstations inside it:

Room	Workstations	Who locks it	Who enters while locked
No workstations	0	Nobody (cannot be locked)	Everyone
Dedicated	1	Only the workstation owner	Only the workstation owner
Shared	2 or more	People with access and administrators	People with access and administrators

In a shared room, the owners of its workstations have access automatically, plus anyone you add.

Manage access to shared rooms

You need the Manage team permission.

Open Office & maps.
Go to Room access. Each shared room shows its number of workstations and whether it is locked or open.
To let someone in, pick them under Choose a person and click Grant access.
To take access away, click the X next to their name.
To lock or unlock the room from here, use Lock or Unlock.

Workstation owners are marked as workstation owners and cannot be removed: their access comes from their workstation. Dedicated rooms are only counted at the end of the list, because only their owner controls them.

Lock from the map

People with access can also lock the room from inside the office, with the Lock the room button in the user controls. See the steps for everyone in Rooms and locks.

What happens when a room is locked:

Every door and opening of the room is blocked for people without access.
People already inside can stay and leave, but cannot come back without access.
Inner rooms that can only be reached through a locked room become unreachable too.
The rule is also enforced on the server: a modified app cannot get around the lock.

If you publish a new map and a room no longer exists, its lock and access list are discarded. If the workstation of a dedicated room is released or changes owner, the room is unlocked.

When someone knocks

A person without access standing at a locked door sees Knock on the door. People inside the room get the request with Let in or Not now; the first answer wins.

Let in gives a single entry, valid for 10 minutes. Once the person leaves the room, that entry is gone and they need to knock again.
Anyone with access to the room can let someone in, including administrators in shared rooms.
Temporary entries do not show up in Room access: they don't change the permanent list.
Each person can knock on the same door at most once every 10 seconds.

If someone gets stuck in an inner room with no open path, the office shows No way out with Go to the entrance, which takes them straight to the arrival point.

Meeting zones

Some ready-made rooms in the catalog include a Meeting zone. Walking into the zone automatically joins that space's meeting; walking out disconnects. A zone's meeting can only be reached by entering it and is not listed with the other meetings.

In the composer (see Office and map):

The zone comes with the ready-made room and moves with it.
Select the zone to change its Zone name, or remove it with Delete.
You cannot draw a new zone by hand.

If the zone is in a locked room, only people who can enter the room can join its meeting. To learn about meetings themselves, see Meetings.

Privacy

Locks and access lists exist to protect conversations. Avoid granting permanent access "just in case": let people knock instead. Access lists and locks follow the published map and never store what is said in the room.