This is where a schedule is made — the chapter for anyone who has talks but not yet a program, whether they came from a call for abstracts, from your own committee, or from nowhere at all yet. It is also where an imported program is edited once it lands.
The building blocks
A theme running through the event — a subject stream, a stage, an audience. Tracks carry a color that shows up on the agenda and on signage, and they drive reviewer expertise, per-track scoring and capacity in the call for abstracts.
A block of time in a room. It has a type, a chair, a track, and a start and end. Sessions are what appear on the agenda grid and on signage.
An individual talk inside a session, with a presenter and optional co-presenters. Files hang off presentations, and so does content review.
Not something you create directly. Assign someone as a presenter and they become a speaker; the Faculty tab is the roster that results — and it also lists abstract, poster and paper authors, so it is the one place every contributor appears, filterable by type.
Starting from nothing
A meeting with an entirely invited program — no call for abstracts, nothing to import — starts here, and the order of operations is worth stating plainly because it is not obvious:
Confirm the venue and its rooms
Rooms are what the agenda is laid out against, so they come first. An organization manager adds them to the venue if they are not there already.
Define your tracks
The themes or streams running through the meeting. Tracks carry a color through the agenda and signage, and they let you plan a stream at a time.
Lay out the sessions
The blocks of time in rooms. Do this with the Session Builder below, or one at a time if the program is small.
Add the presentations
Either by creating them directly, or — where they came from a call for abstracts — by placing the ones conversion has already created.
Assign the speakers
Setting somebody as presenter is what makes them a speaker, grants their access, and puts the upload on their to-do list. There is no separate step for inviting them.
Arrange it on the grid
Move things until the day works. Then reveal it — see Making the program public below.
Timed or ordered sessions
Each session declares how its presentations are arranged:
- Timed — each presentation has its own clock time. Use for parallel sessions where delegates room-hop between talks.
- Ordered — presentations simply run in sequence within the session's block. Use for panels, symposia and anything where the internal timing is the chair's business.
The choice matters more than it looks, because it decides whether a talk carries a clock time at all. An ordered session holds a running order; a timed session holds a timetable.
The Session Builder
Laying out a four-day, six-room program one session at a time is the most tedious hour in conference planning, and it is arithmetic rather than judgement: given the days, the rooms and how long a session runs, the grid is largely determined. The Session Builder does that arithmetic.
You reach it from a Build sessions button on the Agenda toolbar, or from the prompt on an event that has no sessions yet. It asks a short, fixed set of questions:
Which days, and what hours each day
Defaulted from the event's dates, in venue time.
Which rooms are hosting
Picked from the venue's rooms. How many you pick is how many sessions run in parallel.
Schedule by track?
Offered only if the event has tracks, with the option of giving a track its own room.
How long a session runs
An hour by default. The number of sessions per day follows from the daily window once the fixed blocks are taken out.
How long a presentation gets
Per presentation type, plus a buffer for questions and changeover. This is what produces the times inside a timed session, and what tells you when a session is over-full.
Timed or ordered
For the sessions about to be generated. Ordered unless you choose otherwise.
Fixed blocks
The things that must be reserved before anything else can be placed: lunch, refreshment breaks, a daily keynote. Each gets a name and a time range, and they are created as sessions in their own right.
Then it shows you the grid it is proposing, before anything is created. Rename a session, remove one, and commit when it looks right — at which point the whole layout is created in one action.
What it does and does not do
- The sessions come out empty. The builder makes the skeleton; the talks are placed afterwards. It is deliberately not trying to guess which presentation belongs in which session.
- Names are generic and editable — "[Track] — Session 2" where you have tracks, otherwise "Session 1A", "Session 1B" by day and room. Rename them inline afterwards, as you always could.
- It adds; it never overwrites. Running it on an event that already has sessions will not touch them. It checks for room clashes against what is already there and tells you which sessions collide rather than quietly double-booking a room.
- It is not a gap-filler. It generates the layout you described; it does not inspect a half-built agenda and infer what is missing.
- It needs permission to manage sessions on the event, like every other change here.
Filling the sessions: the placement tray
The agenda carries a tray down its side with two tabs. Presentations lists every talk not yet placed — drag one onto a session block to place it, or use fill by track to distribute abstract-derived talks into the matching track's sessions, with a preview before anything is written. Sessions lists sessions that are not fully placed — missing a time, a room, or both — and they drag onto the grid the same way, landing where you drop them with a confirmation first. The Presentations tab also works for any size of program from the Presentations tab itself: assign a presentation to a session and set its order or time there.
The agenda grid
The Agenda tab lays the day out as rooms down the side, time across the top, one day at a time, with sessions as colored blocks. It is the fastest way to see a clash, a gap, or an overloaded room. An event with no rooms yet is not a dead end: the empty agenda offers to add rooms on the spot and points at the Session Builder, and an empty day always shows every room so there is something to drop onto.
Drag a session to move it — to another room, another time, or both. Rostrum then asks you to confirm, showing the old and new room and the old and new time, and offering to snap to the hour, the half hour, or leave it exactly where you dropped it. Nothing moves until you confirm, so a mis-drag costs nothing.
Drag a session's edge to change its start or end without moving it. The live preview works in five-minute steps; the confirmation offers the same snap choices as a move. For a timed session whose start moved, Rostrum asks what to do with the talks inside — shift them with the session, or leave their clock times alone — and warns when leaving them alone would strand a talk outside the session's new window. Presentation lengths are never scaled: a thirty-minute talk stays thirty minutes whatever happens to its session.
Edit the running order inside a timed session from its details drawer: Edit timeline opens a one-lane editor where the session's talks sit back-to-back in order. Drag a talk to reorder, type a new length in minutes, or use the bulk tools — distribute evenly across the session window, or apply default lengths from your agenda settings. Everything is local until you save, and talks pushed past the session's end are flagged rather than silently truncated.
Filter by track to untangle a busy day, and open the grid full-screen for planning meetings.
When AI assistance is enabled, the agenda toolbar also offers Build my program — describe the program you want in plain language, answer the follow-up questions, and review a complete proposed schedule before creating any of it. The same surface can read a past year's program from its website or from pasted text and use it as the base. See Chapter 24.
Making the program public
There is no single "publish" button, and that is deliberate — visibility is layered so you can expose part of a program while the rest is still moving:
- The event status moves Draft → Published → Live → Completed.
- Individual sessions and presentations each have a visibility switch, which controls whether they appear on signage and in the app.
- The Attendee App only serves an event that has the product enabled and a web address set.
- Posters have their own draft, published and withdrawn states, plus their own viewer window.
A practical consequence: you can put the whole skeleton in weeks early, keep the unconfirmed sessions hidden, and reveal them individually as speakers are confirmed.
Running late on the day
A session can be marked as running late by a number of minutes. This is picked up by digital signage, so the screens outside the room show the adjusted time without anyone editing the program itself.