Connect a booking panel to Offision
A new panel is not told where your server is. It shows a six-character code and waits for somebody to claim it. What happens on the wall, what happens in the console, and what to change before the panel goes up.
A panel out of its box knows one address, and it is not yours. It dials a registration service that every Offision panel in the world dials, gets a six-character code, and waits for somebody to claim it. Typing that code into your console is the whole of the pairing: it is what tells the service which server this panel belongs to.
Pairing is one move: the six characters on the panel, typed into the console.
That is why there is no server address to type on the panel, and why a panel that has lost its network shows a code screen rather than an error about your server.
1. Let the panel boot
Power it on and leave it. After the brand animation it settles on a screen carrying six characters in two groups of three, above the line Enter in Offision “Management console” and the path it wants you to follow.
A panel waiting to be claimed. The six characters are the whole of it.
Nothing is typed here — and the settings the bar along the bottom offers are all easier to set later, from the console.
If the panel instead says it cannot connect to the server, it has not reached the registration service. That is a network problem at the panel end — the console cannot help, because the panel has not yet said anything to it.
2. Open the wizard
Go to Devices › Booking panel › Devices and choose Add.
Open Booking panel
Every panel already paired, and the button that adds the next one.
The wizard asks four things in order — Design, Resource, Brand, Connect — and each one is locked until the one above it is answered. Only the last does anything irreversible.
3. Choose the kind of panel, then the room
Design asks where this panel is going, not what colour it should be: Room booking panel for the one by the door, Desk booking panel for a hot desk, Meeting assistant panel for the one on the table inside the room. Take Use this design when you have picked.
The five steps, with the first one open.
This choice is not permanent, and it is not where the panel’s look is decided — the logo, colours and text sizes all live in the panel configuration. See Show your company logo on a room panel.
Resource is the room, and it is the one answer worth being careful about: this is what makes the panel this room’s panel, and a panel on the wrong door is the commonest thing to have to undo afterwards. Rooms that already have a panel say so on the right. Pick one, then Next.
The room this panel will show, by building and floor.
4. Choose the brand
Certified devices is the hardware Offision tests against: Crestron room and desk panels, Qbic panels, desk panels and docks, IAdea panels, Cisco Room Navigator and Neat Pad. Other devices underneath covers an iPad, an Android tablet, a Windows tablet, or a third-party system loading the panel in a web view.
Certified hardware, the general options underneath, and Preview window for trying this without any.
The brand decides what happens next rather than what gets created: each one carries its own installation guideline, and the steps that get the app onto a Crestron panel are not the steps that get it onto a Qbic one. Read it before going further, and use Support models on a tile to check the exact model on your desk is one of them.
Preview window — If you have no device on your hand — opens a panel in a browser tab instead. It pairs exactly like real hardware, which makes it the way to walk this page through once before anything is mounted.
5. Type the code
The Connect step shows that brand’s guideline with a six-box field under it. Type the characters from the panel; it submits itself on the sixth.
The guideline for the chosen brand, and the field that claims the panel.
Within a few seconds the panel stops showing the code and starts showing the room. If the code is refused, read it off the panel again rather than retyping what you wrote down — the code lives on an open connection, so a panel that has been asleep, rebooted or off the network since you noted it is now showing a different one.
6. Change the pass code it shows you
A few seconds after the panel lands on the room, it raises a dialog by itself: This is the pass code for this device, the four digits, and under them You need this pass code to access the settings page. Nobody asked for it — it appears because this is the one moment somebody is certain to be standing at the panel. It closes itself on a countdown.
Every new panel starts on 0000, and every new panel starts on the same 0000. That pass code is the only thing between a passer-by and the panel’s own settings, where the screen can be rotated, the language changed, and the pairing wiped altogether.
Change it while that dialog is still on screen. It carries a pencil in the corner of the digits, which opens Edit pass code without going anywhere else, and this is by far the easiest moment to do it. Afterwards the same change lives behind the pass code you are trying to replace, under Change pass code in the panel’s own settings.
If a panel’s pass code is ever lost, Reset passcode on its row in the console is the way back in.
7. Check it worked
The panel now has a row in Devices › Booking panel › Devices, with its Connection status, its Linked resource and the configuration it follows. Selecting the row opens a detail panel with the same fields editable, a live Real-time screen, and Reboot, Reset passcode and Disconnect device.
A paired panel: the room it shows, the configuration it follows, and whether it is talking to the server right now.
Connection status should read online within a minute of pairing. If it says offline while the panel is plainly showing the room, the panel has the room cached and has since lost the server — a different fault from one that never paired, and one this page cannot fix.
Then prove it end to end rather than trusting the row: book the room for yourself and watch the panel change while you are standing at it.
What this does not control
- How the panel behaves. Its buttons, its skin and the credentials it asks for all come from a shared panel configuration, not from anything set here — see How a panel gets its settings and How somebody proves who they are at the panel.
- What its colours mean. The panel starts showing status the moment it pairs; What the panel’s colours mean is what the colours are saying.
- Moving a panel to another room. That is an edit on the device — change its room in the detail panel. It does not need to be paired again.
- Retiring one. Disconnect device on the device releases the hardware while keeping the record; Reset, in the panel’s own settings, wipes the pairing from the panel end and sends it back to the code screen. Use the first to swap a broken panel for a new one, the second when the panel is leaving.