Forum Discussion
How to implement a simple booking system in Microsoft Teams?
Our team shares a pool of six remote linux machines which are used as targets for testing our software. We access them from our Windows laptops. We need a booking system to allow each developer to reserve a machine for a certain time period. We have been doing this in Outlook, booking an appointment with the machines as resources, but this is quite onerous as it's necessary to setup an appointment and wade through the address list to find the machines, and then identify which machines are free.
We are all using Microsoft Teams. Can anyone suggest a simple way of managing such a booking system in Teams?
tanberdul First I want to thank you and commend you on creating a sample sheet, there is no way I would have any idea where to even start without it. That said, your request is still quite vague but I'll make 2 suggestions:
a) format the data range as a table. This will give you the ability to easily filter ranges to find what you need.
b) i think it may be useful to add a column at the end that counts how many of the completion dates are empty. There are a lot of ways of adding this up and I created one that is sort of flexible in that you can expand it and it also counts the number of target dates, but there may be easier ways. BUT the point is that having that column will let you easily filter out all of the 0's (i.e. all the rows that are done). you could also sort based on rows that have the most left.
c) you could also add a column that has the oldest incomplete target date and again you can sort by this column to address those that are most overdue or soon to be. And again I came up with a complicated formula but it seems to work 🙂
see attached
5 Replies
David Aldrich Just a heads up for Microsoft Bookings. It's available from within Teams (search for more apps). Maybe not applicable in this scenario but wanted to mention it!
ChristianBergstrom Thanks for suggesting Microsoft Bookings. Unfortunately our Teams is not connected to an Office 365 Exchange, we use our own Exchange, so I don't think Bookings will work (it says "A valid Office 365 mailbox is required.").
David Aldrich Hi I think if you setup them up as Meeting room mailboxes on exchange online you should be able to use the free Book a Room App from Microsoft. I used it for setting up bookings for meeting rooms. Just give a meaningful name.
TY
MAJIDAM Thanks very much for your suggestion. Is the app only for Android or will it also run on Windows desktop?
