THE PROBLEM: You've got a few meeting rooms available in your office, and want to manage bookings for meetings in those rooms in a do-it-yourself way - so people can see when the rooms are free, and make their own bookings.
WHERE KAHOOTZ HELPS:
- The configure ability of Kahootz allows you to customise solutions towards your needs.
- No need for a specialist system - use alongside your existing workspaces at no extra cost.
- Multiple users can access the same system with individual logins – rather than needing to have the system managed by admin staff.
- Web access from any location and from mobile devices means you don’t have to return to the office to make entries – rooms can be booked from anywhere.
- Whilst this example talks about meeting rooms, you can use the same principle for any resource - travelling projectors, pool laptops, exhibition equipment etc.
HOW TO SET IT UP
- We recommend a new workspace for the room bookings, though if you already have an existing 'all staff' workspace that might be suitable, you can do this in a folder in that workspace. (For larger organisations you might want one workspace per office or division.)
- Create a calendar for each room in the top level of the workspace.
- Use the room name/description as the calendar name.
- Allow all members to add events (or restrict to a team if that's more suited for you).
- Use Customise this page on each calendar to add a panel at the top saying what's in the room - seating for 12 people, projector, conference phone etc.
- The Week View of the calendar is probably the best for spotting any overlaps - two meetings in the same room.
- Have a workspace homepage dashboard with an Upcoming Events item for each calendar (you can limit those dashboard items to show just one calendar's events), so that gives you a quick "at a glance now and next" view on the bookings.
USING THE WORKSPACE
- Remember to invite your staff members into the workspace.
- When looking at calendars with overlays, (where you can see all bookings in all rooms,) turn them off to see just the room you're looking at.
- Overlays on/off is a personal setting that then applies to whatever calendars you look at, rather than a setting on the calendar for everybody.
- You can print the calendar week view and stick it to the room door if you want to show who has pre-bookings.
- To move a meeting from one room to another, edit the event - there's an option to move to another room/calendar (you don't have to delete and recreate).
Please Note: Kahootz doesn't understand that you're then using the calendar for "resource allocation", so it will let you double book a room. Human intelligence ought to stop that if people check first - a note on the workspace homepage often helps.