Room booking in shared calendar

[benpollinger]

Hello all,

I'm new to GroupWise, I'm a user trying to help out my department, and I've found this site very helpful in the past on other matters. So...

I work in a department of about 30 staff, who share 4 busy clinic rooms. They currently book them on paper, but as all have accesss to GroupWise 6, I thought there must be a better way.

Ideally, any user could access a shared calendar, to check if a room was free on day X at time Y, and book it if so. They could also unbook it if clients cancel. I've looked at the GroupWise help file and it seems that someone has to 'own' the room as a 'resource', and I'm not sure how workable this is - ideally no one person would need to confirm/deny calendar changes.

Any pointers very gratefully received.

Thanks,
Ben

http://www.pollinger.org.uk

http://www.psyclick.org.uk

 

[cdove]

The best way is to create a resource for each room.

The resource will have an owner, ideally someone who has the time to check the accounts. This 'Owner' can proxy in and accept or decline bookings.

Once the resources have been created they will appear in the address book and the users can send an appointment to them. Ideally the users will use the Busy check facility to check if they are already booked..

The owner could set up a rule to auto accept appointments or decline if the room is already booked.

Hope this helps

 

[lexus]

You should also have a backup owner in case the "owner" is on vacation or out for some reason. This is how we successfully do our resources.

**Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.**

 

[lgarner]

Easy way is for you, or the owner, to grant proxy rights. We'd give read-only rights to everyone, and write access to whoever might actually need to modify the calendar.

 

[lexus]

That's exactly what we do.

We also have everyone set their preferences for Appointments (Accept and Deny) to Notify and Email. That way, if any appointment is accepted or denied, email is sent and you don't have to check your calendar. You receive notification by email and it works great.

We all have proxy access to all our resources (labs, cars, even projectors). It's easier than continually busy searching when you have multiple resources to pick from. In fact, we all have proty access to every employee's calendar. Of course, the proxy access is read-only and calendar only, not email. It really is easier when setting up appointments through the multiple user calendars. Busy search can be long-way around sometimes. Read rights thru proxy access is quick.

Of course, everyone has to be using their calendar! We've been using GroupWise since 1998 on a corporate level with a lot of success. We install it for a lot of customers as well. I also do corporate training on it and it is one of the easiest to train on (web client and desktop client).

Just LOVE the program. I also train on Outlook which I totally abhor.

**Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.**

 

[MichiganRon]

I highly recommend that you do NOT allow "write" proxy access to everyone. What you'll find would happen is that everyone would proxy to the resource to see if it was available, then create an appointment from within the resource. They'd then forget to tell you who they were, leaving no paper trail as to who requested the resource.

Make sure they are required to send appointments from their own mailbox. It leaves a paper trail, so you know who to talk to if you have any questions about the appointment.

Ron

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?” ~ Mevlana Rumi


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[lexus]

For sure, MichiganRon! A mistake that would be most regretted!!!

Read-rights only to the Calendar only...

**Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.**

 

[1oldfoxman]

We created a single owner account for which a couple of IT people know the password (this avoids the issue of re-assigning ownership when staff turns over). This owner account "owns" all the resources. Someone from IT then assigns read-only calendar access to all GW users to each resource (this is easy and involves selecting only one line in the proxy access drop down). The resource owner also sets up Rules to accept/decline invitations depending on whether pre-existing calendar entries for the requested time slot. The rule then Replies with a " requested accepted" message or "request denied" message depending on the situation.

In this way users "invite" the resource from their own account and receive a message back from the resource regarding the accept/decline status from the resource. They have the ability to do a busy search on the resources or see their calendar in the multi-user view. Since we set up similar resources in system groups (e.g. all the conference rooms at any facility), users can see availabilty of various rooms by inviting the "group", then deleting the unwanted resources from the invitation list.

This all works very well for us and users love it.

hth
Dennis