Managing rooms with Zimbra

[flyerguybham]

We currently have a secretary who serves as the central repository of rooms scheduling. If you want to use a room, you ask her first, she adds it to a calendar that she keeps. We want to replace this manual process with Zimbra.

We want the following functionality:

- All users should be able to request a room for their meeting
- All room requests need to be approved by this secretary
- All users should be able to see a room's current schedule
- The room should not be double-booked

So, some of this seems easy. If we make the rooms as locations, then users can request a room, and the room can say "hey I am already in use then". However, there is no workflow that defers the assignment of the room until the secretary approves the request. Is this possible?

Also, does a Location have a calendar view? For instance, if the secretary wanted to print out a list of each room's schedule at the beginning of each week and tape it to that room's door, does that view exist?

It seems we want rooms to act more like user accounts than locations. If they were user accounts, users could request the room's participation in a meeting, search that room's busy/free schedule, and the room user could share its calendar with everyone else for viewing. However, the approval workflow seems sloppy - like the secretary would have to log into each room's account and click accept on a bunch of messages. Seems ugly. Is there a better way?

We have four rooms at the moment that need to be managed this way.

[mgibeault]

Hi all,

I would like to have a similar behavior for our meeting room too.

-Marc

[hchan]

Looks like this thread has been here for a while and seems unresolved at the moment.

My institution needs this kind of function too.

[mmorse]

This thread is from 2007, and what the OP requested is now possible.

zmprov ma resource@domain.com zimbraCalResAutoAcceptDecline FALSE
zmprov ma resource@domain.com zimbraPrefCalendarForwardInvitesTo secretary@domain.com
zmmailbox -z -m resource@domain.com mfg /Calendar account secretary@domain.com rwidxa
zmmailbox -z -m secretary@domain.com cm /ResourceCal resource@domain.com /Calendar

Optional settings, really it just depends if your organization allows some leeway/if it's ok for the secretary to sort it out later.
zmprov ma resource@domain.com zimbraCalResAutoDeclineIfBusy FALSE/TRUE
zmprov ma resource@domain.comzimbraCalResMaxNumConflictsAllowed 0 (means decline on any conflict)
zmprov ma resource@domain.com zimbraCalResMaxPercentConflictsAllowed 0 (means decline on any conflict)
zmprov ma resource@domain.com zimbraCalResAutoDeclineRecurring FALSE/TRUE

(You can have multiple forwarding addresses if needed.)

This was done in: Bug 12414 - Improve overall user experience of setting up and using calendar resource that doesn't automatically accept/decline

To make the configuration of that easier/set an owner in the admin console when creating a resource: Bug 12261 - resource/location owner-manager

[hchan]

Thanks, I'll give that a try. Here's hoping this works the same for versions 5.0.x and 6.x

[mmorse]

Some of those have been there for a while, others in later 5.x versions, however zimbraPrefCalendarForwardInvitesTo wasn't added until 6.0.0_BETA1

Don't forget to update your profile with version info