Has anyone used Shifts as an office register for offices smaller than 100 people?
Problem: Company wants to give employees the opportunity to go back to the office. However, due to Covid, they can't house all employees at the same time. Going back to the office is voluntary. They wanted a scheduling app to enable people to book a space at the office that wouldn't go over the max limit to comply with Covid regulations. They also wanted to keep a record of who was in the office in case of track and trace requirements. They also wanted to use Teams as the interface rather than Outlook or a web app. They want employees to be able to easily book a space and for it to be self-service.
Shared Calendar options weren't ideal as adding them to the Teams interface as a tab doesn't work optimally. Also, a Shared Calendar didn't cut the mustard due to difficulty in identifying easily if they'd gone over the capacity. A Room resource calendar does allow for conflicts, but this was a bit tricky.
Whilst Shifts is designed for Managers "managing the shift" by assigning and approving shifts and first line workers being able to book time off and request shift swaps, I found it was really useful and super simple as a "space at the office" booking system. Once the shift was created and the number of slots assigned as max capacity of the office, all the users had to do is, go to the Shift calendar, find the day, find out if there were slots available and assign themselves to a shift. They can easily see if there are slots/space available, how many left and who has them booked. It comes with limitations, in order for everyone to see who else will be in the office and be able to assign themselves to a shift, they need to be an owner of the team and Teams have a max capacity of 100 owners per team. So, this doesn't scale. Also, anyone can remove shifts from others. I imagine that's because it's designed for Managers controlling the shifts. There was a requirement for self-service, so this was a sacrifice.
I was interested to know if
1) Anyone is using shifts or something else for a similar requirement
2) If anyone knows what changes will be coming to Shifts to improve this requirement or
3) If anyone including Microsoft is developing an app for this requirement
