Room Booking application

[MartyB]

We currently have an in-house application that is used to book rooms for events such as meetings (for internal and external groups), tutorials, teleconferenced sessions. We recently installed Zimbra and, if possible, would like to use its calendaring features to replace our room booking application.

We don’t necessarily want to use Calendar to send emails to invitees in this application but do want to be able to search for and book the locations and resources for the events. We also need to be able to restrict access to certain users, assign room managers and tech support to specific locations, and set up public display stations to show what rooms are being used on a given day. Room booking must allow for multiple rooms for individual events, as well as recurring days/times. We would also like to be able to assign an event type to each booking, filter searches and displays by those types as well as date and/or location, and archive past events for future reference.

One unique feature that is needed involves setup and breakdown times for events. The person doing the booking has to be able to specify if additional time is required before the event for setup, or after for breakdown/cleanup, or both. We do not want these times shown on the public displays but the times must be taken into account when bookings are made so there is no overlap/double booking.

Do any of you know of an existing or planned application that can do what we need? Any suggestions for how to use the features of Zimbra effectively for this application?

[Krishopper]

You can definitely use Zimbra for that. However, it won't meet all of your requirements.

The prep setup/teardown of the room will need to show busy if it is actually booked as busy.

There isn't an existing application to show the room schedule on a public display, but using Zimbra's API (SOAP) one could easily be made in any web scripting language. That being said, you could mark the setup/teardown times as private, or something, and have your public display system just not show them to make that display cleaner.

There are a lot of options.

[kruon]

Originally Posted by Krishopper

There isn't an existing application to show the room schedule on a public display,

You can use the resource calendar for that. Just enable the visibility on web and share it without event names. It'll show you freebusy times on browser.