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Peter Mcdermott's avatar
Peter Mcdermott
Iron Contributor
Feb 22, 2017

Need Help Using SharePoint Calendar to Reserve Workspaces

Here's my interesting scenario:

 

My team has about 25 'free address' workspaces that we have available for our remote associates. My goal is to create a system that allows them to easily reserve a workspace. Here are some of the conditions that I would like to satisfy:

 

  1. The same workspace cannot be reserved more than once/double-booked
  2. Users should be able to see a calendar view of which workspaces are reserved and available
  3. Some workspaces will need to be booked with recurring appointments
  4. *BONUS* If users were only allowed to book workspacesup to 14 days out

 

So far, I have come up with a stop gap solution using multiple calendars. There are four calendars: Workspaces, Offices, Phones Rooms and Meeting Rooms. What I have done is set up a recurring appointment with the title 'Available' and asked associates to change 'Available' to their name for each event occurence that they wish to book the workspace:

 

 

The problem with this is that people are accidentally overriding the recurrance or deleting entire appointments. Furthermore, when they book something for the following month and save, the calendar UI brings them back to the current month, making it confusing when trying to book multiple days in a future month.

 

What I would like to do, is use a custom list to create a very very simple form:

 

 

While this appears clean, efficient and effective in the Form view, when viewed in calendar, it appears as so:

 

 

In the events/calendar list, there is a toggle for 'All Day Event.' Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find a way to add this to a custom list. If I could get the reservations to be stacked vertically as opposed to horizontally, this might work. Despite the fact there is no way to prevent someone from double-booking the same resource, I think the simplicity of this would over arch the complexity of the massive recurring calendar appointments.

 

Does anyone have a solution on how I can acheive this easily using out of the box features?

 

A solution to this problem would be incredibly helpful for teams that are removing to hybrid-remote scenarios in all sorts of verticals, so all of your input could be transformative to the way that businesses around the world handle office hoteling. You could help change the world by solving this problem and reduce our carbon footprint and significantly reduce contributions to the swear jar at the same time!

#SharePoint #Calendar #OOTB #ResourceReservation #Office365

  • jcgonzalezmartin's avatar
    jcgonzalezmartin
    Feb 23, 2017
    Glad to help...my two cents here :-)
    (1) Of course, instead of using a Room / resource mailbox you can always go for a bookings App such as the one you have found that could meet also your requirements...and also take a look a Microsoft Bookings, it could also fit on your scenario
    (2) A Room / resource Mailbox is just a Mailbox so you can do quite a lot of configurations including the ability to accept reject booking reservations by specific people and much more as you can see here: https://technet.microsoft.com/es-es/library/jj215781(v=exchg.160).aspx

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