Session Plan
Step 1 of two. Run the automatic planner that proposes a rooms × time-slots grid from your accepted content, review the proposed assignments and any unplaced sessions, then publish the plan to give every session a room, day, and time. Publishing sets the times but does not yet show anything to attendees — Sessions Schedule does that. Includes a "before you plan" readiness checklist and per-reason guidance for sessions that couldn't be placed.
The two steps, and why there are two
Getting a schedule in front of attendees takes two sub-tabs, in this order:
- Session Plan (this page) decides where and when each session happens — its room, day, and time.
- Sessions Schedule then puts the talks into those sessions so attendees can see them.
Times flow in that direction: a talk copies the room, day, and time from its session at the moment you save it. So publishing the plan first is what makes the second step produce anything.
A published plan means every session is timetabled — but the attendee schedule lists talks, not sessions. Until you open Sessions Schedule and choose Save to schedule, attendees see an empty schedule even though the plan is complete. If you save the talks first, that is fine too: publish the plan, then save again so the talks pick up the new times.
Purpose
The Session Plan sub-tab is the payoff of the planning pipeline. It reads your accepted content counts (live), lets you choose a planning mode and defaults, then runs the planner to propose a grid of sessions across rooms and time slots. You review the proposed grid plus a capacity summary and an unplaced-sessions list, and when you're happy you publish the plan to write the assignments onto your sessions.
When you use it
Use this sub-tab once your venue, rooms, and time slots are in place and acceptances are decided. Run the planner as many times as you like — only publishing commits the result. Re-running after publishing re-proposes only the sessions that aren't already confirmed.
Walkthrough
- 1
Open the Conference Leadership Console, select your conference, open the Presentation System tab, and click the Session Plan sub-tab.
- 2
Check the badge at the top right of the instructions panel. It reads Not published yet or Plan published, and it is read from the plan itself — so it stays accurate after a reload and after further planner runs.
- 3
If the tab says this conference has no schedule plan yet, create one from the Time Slots sub-tab, then come back.
- 4
Read the Before you plan checklist — it confirms rooms and time slots are defined, shows how much schedulable content exists across all programs, and warns if any accepted papers have no presentation format (those won't be scheduled). It's guidance only; you can still run the planner.
- 5
Review the Accepted content (live) counts, then pick a Mode — Mode A (By dates): you set the number of days and the planner computes the rooms needed; or Mode B (By rooms): you set the room inventory and the planner computes the slots needed.
- 6
Adjust the Defaults (conference days, working minutes per day, slot / paper / keynote minutes), then click Run planner.
- 7
Review the Capacity summary and the Proposed grid (rooms × slots). Each filled cell shows the session name, its type, and the presentation titles assigned to it. The grid has a horizontal scrollbar at both the top and the bottom — use either to pan across all time slots; the room column stays pinned on the left.
- 8
If any sessions couldn't be placed, work through the couldn't be placed panel. Sessions are grouped by why they failed (no compatible room, no compatible time slot, or all compatible cells full), and each group tells you exactly what to add — for example, "Add a Keynote-tier room in the Venue & Rooms sub-tab, then re-run the planner."
- 9
When the grid looks right, click Publish plan and confirm. The confirmation closes immediately and a Publishing the plan… indicator appears in the header until the write finishes. Each session gets its confirmed room, day, and time.
- 10
Open the Sessions Schedule sub-tab and choose Save to schedule, so the talks pick up these times and appear on the attendee schedule.
If sessions appear in the couldn't be placed panel, follow the remedy shown for each group — the planner matches each session type to a specific room tier and time-slot kind, so the fix is usually adding a room of the named tier (Venue & Rooms) or a slot of the named kind (Time Slots), then re-running. You can also place a session by hand in the Sessions sub-tab; confirmed sessions are pinned and kept on the next run. Publishing skips any assignment whose time slot is missing.
Tips
- Running the planner is non-destructive — it only stores a proposal. You can run, tweak inputs, and run again freely before publishing.
- After publishing, confirmed sessions stay put on a re-run; the planner only re-proposes the unconfirmed ones, so you can lock in good placements and keep iterating on the rest.
- After publishing, go straight to Sessions Schedule and save. A published plan with unsaved talks is the single most common reason an organizer reports an empty schedule.
- The accepted counts are derived live from your submissions and invited submissions, so they reflect your latest decisions every time you open the tab.
- If the Before you plan checklist warns that some accepted papers have no presentation format, fix those papers first — otherwise they're silently left out of the grid. The planner includes accepted content from every program (main, workshops, industry, and any custom program), not just one.