How to Host Guests in a Virtual Office Waiting Room

The moment a virtual office becomes genuinely useful is also the moment it becomes risky: when you bring in someone who does not work for you. A client, a candidate, a contractor. They should feel welcomed, they should need nothing more than a browser, and they should see exactly one room and nothing else.

This guide covers how to do that with time-boxed guest links and a waiting room, what the experience looks like from the guest's side, the checklist a host should run before the meeting, and how to review afterwards who let whom in.

Who counts as a guest, and what they must never see

A guest is anyone who is not a member of your office. That includes people you trust completely: a long-standing client, a partner agency you talk to daily, a former colleague. The distinction is not about trust; it is about scope. Members can see the office board, presence, rooms and conversations. Guests should see a single room and the people who chose to be in it with them.

Concretely, a guest should never see:

• who else works at your company, or who is online right now;
• the names of your other rooms, especially client suites named after other clients;
• any room chat, direct message or meeting they were not invited to;
• your office after the meeting is over.

Every one of those leaks has happened in tools that treat guests as "members with fewer permissions". The safer model is the one hotels use: a guest has a key to one room for a defined stay, and the key stops working at checkout. That is how guest links work on KioskMate, and it is why they are scoped to a client suite rather than to the office.

How time-boxed guest links work

A guest link is created by a host for a specific client suite and carries three properties.

Expiry. The link is valid for a window you set when you create it, typically the meeting slot plus a buffer. Outside that window it opens to a polite "this invitation has ended" page rather than a room. A link sent for Tuesday cannot be reused on Thursday.

Single-suite scope. The link admits the guest to one client suite. The rest of the office does not exist from their point of view: no office board, no room list, no directory. If your team keeps three suites for three clients, a guest in suite A has no way of learning that suites B and C exist.

Revocation. A host or admin can revoke a link at any point before or during its window. The guest is removed from the suite and the link stops working immediately. This is the control you want when a meeting is cancelled after the invitation went out, or when a link was forwarded to someone it should not have reached.

Guest links are included from the Team plan upward (see the plan comparison for what each tier includes). The Free plan gives you the office and its rooms for your own team; adding outsiders is where the Team plan starts.

The waiting-room flow from the guest's side

The guest experience is deliberately short, because every extra step loses somebody.

1. The guest receives a link by email or calendar invite. There is no account to create and nothing to install; the link opens in any modern browser on a laptop or a phone.
2. They enter a display name. This is the name your team sees in the suite, so the prompt encourages a real one.
3. They land in the waiting room: a simple page that says which company they are visiting and that the host has been notified. They cannot see or hear anything in the suite yet.
4. The host, who sees the arrival on their side, admits them. If the host is running late, the guest simply waits; they are never dropped into an empty room.
5. The guest is now in the client suite with the host and anyone else the host has brought in. Voice, video and the suite's chat work from the browser.
6. When the meeting ends, or the link expires, or the host revokes it, the guest is returned to a closing page. Reopening the link does not readmit them.

The waiting room does two jobs. It gives the host a moment to finish a private conversation before the guest hears anything, and it turns arrival into an explicit act rather than something that happens to you. A client who joins five minutes early does not find your team debating their proposal.

Host checklist

Run this ten minutes before the guest's arrival time. It takes less time than reading it.

Suite prepared. Open the client suite you will use and make sure nobody is lingering in it from a previous meeting. Rename it for the day if your team reuses suites ("Suite 2 - Northwind kickoff"), so colleagues know not to wander in.

Link checked. Confirm the guest link's window covers the meeting plus fifteen minutes on either side. If the meeting moved, create a new link rather than stretching an old one; short windows are the whole point.

Agenda set. If the meeting is scheduled rather than instant, attach the agenda so your colleagues arrive knowing the shape of the hour. Guests do not see the internal agenda, so anything you want them to see goes in the invite email.

Recording rules stated. If you plan to record, say so in the invitation and again when the guest is admitted, and get their agreement before you start. Recording is available on the Business plan and up; if your plan does not include it, do not improvise with a screen recorder, because you cannot then honour a request to delete it cleanly.

Colleagues in place. Anyone who should be in the meeting is in the suite before you admit the guest. Late internal arrivals into a client meeting look worse online than they do in person.

Exit planned. Know who ends the meeting and who revokes the link if the guest lingers. Usually that is the host. Ending the meeting for everyone closes the suite; the guest link then expires on schedule.

Security and audit: who invited whom

Opening your office to outsiders creates a question an admin will eventually need to answer: who let this person in, and when? KioskMate's audit trail records guest-link events alongside the rest of the office's administrative history.

For each guest link you can see who created it, which suite it pointed at, the window it was valid for, when it was used, and whether it was revoked and by whom. That is enough to answer the two questions that actually come up. "Did anyone outside the company have access on Thursday?" is a filter on the date. "Who sent the link that reached the wrong inbox?" is a lookup on the link.

A few practices keep the trail useful:

• One link per guest per meeting. Shared links ("here is our suite link, use it whenever") defeat expiry and make the audit trail meaningless. Creating a fresh link takes seconds.
• Limit who can create links. Roles on KioskMate let you decide whether every member can invite guests or only managers. Client-facing teams usually let everyone; regulated teams usually do not.
• Review monthly. A five-minute look at the guest-link log each month catches habits before they become incidents: links with all-day windows, suites that are never revoked, one person doing all the inviting.
• Revoke on cancellation. When a meeting is cancelled, revoke the link as part of cancelling. A live link to an empty suite is not dangerous, but it is untidy, and untidy is how mistakes start.

If you handle guests at volume, for example a recruiting team running a dozen interviews a week, or an agency with a suite per account, it is worth reading how to run client meetings without one-off video links, which covers the suite-per-client pattern in more detail.

And if your requirements go beyond what the Team or Business plans include, for instance a dedicated setup for an operator hosting several tenant offices, talk to us about the Landlord and Enterprise options.