From the Workplace Services / Reservations / Reserve Rooms and-or Resources / Create New Room Reservation task, you can:
Note: Rather than providing general staff with the Reservations application, your site might provide general staff with ARCHIBUS Workplace on a tablet, kiosk, or smart phone. With ARCHIBUS Workplace, general staff and guests can reserve meeting space on a one-time or recurring schedule, and a manager can manage the reservations using the Reservations application. For information, see Using ARCHIBUS Workplace.
As another option, your site may provide general staff with the Workplace Portal mobile app, so that they can make one-time reservations from their smart phones.
This topic covers creating a room reservation, and optionally adding resources to it.
This topic includes the following information:
When creating a room reservation, you have a choice about how to specify the time for the meeting. The method you use depends on how flexible you are about the meeting time:
In addition to a room already being reserved, for the general user (including the AFM user), the following variables determine whether a room arrangement will appear after you conduct your room search. Consult your business process owner for information on how these variables have been defined.
Note: Restrictions vary based on your role. For example, the Minimum Required restriction for a room arrangement doesn't apply to Reservation Managers and Reservation Service Desk members. For more information, see Understanding User Roles.
When you select attendees for a reservation, the application shows the attendees availability on the timeline.
Note the following about attendee availability:
You can use the graphical timeline to specify a time period (start time and end time) for a room arrangement. To select a time period in the timeline, you click and drag your mouse over the time period. When you click and drag, the From and To fields in the Filter fill in with the start and end time for the reservation.
The time period for the room arrangement that you selected is highlighted by green and yellow. For detailed information on using the timeline, see Using the Reservations Timeline.
You can create a recurring room or resource reservation that will occur at regular intervals over a given time period. For example, you can request a room and catering every Tuesday morning from 10:00 to 11:00 AM in the month of April.
You set up a recurring meeting by clicking Define Recurrence... in the filter of the Create Room Reservation form. The application then opens a dialog in which you can enter the recurrence pattern. The recurrence pattern is applied to the filter, so it determines the room arrangements that are shown in the Rooms pane.
After entering the recurrence pattern in the filter, when working from either the Reservations application or from the Reservations Plugin for Outlook, the following occurs:
After you define a recurrence pattern, a description of the pattern is shown on the filtering panel below the time filter.
The steps to create a recurring room and resource reservation are included in the below procedure - Procedure: creating a room reservation with or without resources - (recurring or regular.)
The following information describes working with recurring reservations when rooms are not available for all meeting occurrences.
An application parameter HideRoomConflicts determines the rooms that are shown when there is a conflict. The default value is 3 which means only rooms available for all occurrences (if any) are shown, otherwise all rooms available for at least 50% of the occurrences are shown. To review all the possible settings for this parameter, see Setting Application Parameters for the Reservations Application.
Conflicts and time zones
Each occurrence is saved with its Occurrence ID. This avoids conflicts if you move non-conflicted occurrences to a building in a different time zone, or if the time of the occurrence in Exchanges does not match the time in Web Central. This can occur if the Exchange listener is not enabled, and the user changed the time of the occurrence in Exchange using Outlook Web Access.
From the Reservations Plugin for Outlook:
Note: If you create a recurring reservation in the Reservations Plugin for Outlook, and the reservation has conflicts, the dates with conflicts are added to the meeting body of the series.
From the Reservations application
When at least one of the rooms on the timeline has a conflict for the time frame entered in the console, time line drag and drop will be disabled
When using the Reservations application without exchange integration, if you are using email notifications, users receive .ics files to add or remove meetings from their calendars. When creating recurring reservations with conflicts, the body of the email will show only the reserved dates (and not the conflicts). However, the application still generates the appointment in the user's calendar for the conflicted dates. This could make it seem that the room is also reserved for the conflicted dates. Note that all later cancellations to either the conflicted or the reserved dates work correctly. When using Exchange integration, this problem does not occur.
To resolve conflicts:
With Exchange integration and the listener enabled, when you edit the occurrence in Outlook Web Access (OWA) or another client, the change is propagated to the reservation in Web Central.
With Exchange integration, the application removes the location from the occurrences without a reservation. The lack of a location is a flag to let you know that these meetings do not yet have a reserved room.
Without Exchange integration, the application does not modify the .ics calendar invitations; no additional .ics files without the location are sent when there are conflicts.
Note: For recurring reservations, if resources have been added, no resource records are created for the conflicted dates. You need to add the resource to each conflict when you resolve it.
Note: When editing a recurring reservation, the search returns only rooms that are available for all occurrences. This is in contrast to creating a reservation.
To avoid performance issues, the application uses the following to limit the number of occurrences for recurring reservations. The application uses the most restrictive limit of all the limits that apply.
If there is no end date or 'maximum occurrences to create' entered for the reservation, the application uses the most restrictive between 999 and the MaxRecurrencesToCreate activity parameter value.
If a recurring reservation has a large number of occurrences, the system might time out when creating the reservation. In this case, you get the following message:
"Saving reservation failed. Reservation creation has timed out.
Save appointment without reservations?" OK/Cancel"
To resolve this, contact your ARCHIBUS Administrator to reduce the maximum number of occurrences that can be created. You should also delete the appointment to cancel all orphaned reservations.
Reservations Plugin for Outlook. When working from the Reservations Plugin for Outlook only, if you try to save a recurring reservation that has a number of occurrences that exceeds the MaxRecurrencesToCreate application parameter, or that has no end date entered, you get the message: "Continue without reservation?"
This issue does not occur when working from the Reservations application.
For some deployments, it is important to know how many attendees are expected to be physically present for a meeting, rather than knowing the number of invitees, some of whom might attend the meeting remotely. For example, setup personnel might need to know the number of people they are preparing the room for. Also, the Room Capacity Utilization per Month report uses the # of Attendees in Room field to calculate Capacity Use. For these reasons, the application enables you to track the number of attendees that you expect to be physically present.
Here's how this works. When creating a reservation, when you enter the Capacity in the Filter Console and click Apply Filter:
The Room Capacity Utilization per Month report uses the # of Attendees in Room value to calculate the Average Capacity Use per month. See Strategic Management Reports.
For information on the Capacity field when working with recurring conference calls, see Editing Conference calls and the Capacity field.
Note: Entering the Capacity field might be required, depending on how your business process owner set the application parameter PluginCapacityRequired . If required, you must enter a Capacity in the Filter before confirming the reservation.
On Demand Work. If you are integrating the On Demand Work application with the Reservations application, the # of Attendees in Room field is shown in the work request Description so that setup personnel know how many people they are preparing the room for.
Note about Legacy data. When creating a new reservation from the Reservations application, by default, the Capacity field in the Filter and the # of Attendees in the Room field are set to 5. Reservations created before the # of Attendees in Room field was added to the application will have 0 attendees in the room specified, so the Capacity field in the Filter will also be set to 0. It is necessary to update this number only if tracking the # of Attendees in Room is important to your workflow.
You can set up a single or recurring room reservation, and reserve resources at the same time as described in the following procedure.
The Define Reservation form appears.
Use the calendar to select the date of the event.
The Rooms pane updates to show any existing reservations for the selected date for rooms using the default capacity and building entered in the filter. When you select a date, it appears on the form to the right of the calendar. By default, the current date is selected, but you can change this to any date after the current date by clicking on the calendar.
PluginCapacityRequired
, is set to 1, then you must enter the capacity for the room, that is, the number o attendees who will be physically present in the room before creating and saving the reservation. See Capturing the Number o Employees Physically Present for a Meeting and Configuring Parameters.Locate rooms that suit your needs using the filter:
Note: The minimum required attendees restriction doesn't apply to Reservation Managers and Reservation Service Desk members.
Checking the external visitors check box ensures that you reserve only rooms that have been designated as suitable for external visitors. That is, the Rooms pane will show only rooms for which the External Visitors Allowed field for the room arrangement has been set to Yes.
Note: The Capacity field is used to find appropriate room arrangements, but it is also used to capture the actual number of people you expect to be physically present for the meeting. The number entered in the Capacity field is saved to the reserve_rm.attendees_in_room field in the database. You will see the # of Attendees in Room field when you edit a reservation. See Capturing the number of attendees physically present for a meeting.
Available room arrangements for the date and search criteria that you specified are displayed. Room arrangements are ordered first by Building Code, then by default arrangement, and finally by capacity.
Any existing room reservations will appear as blue blocks. Double-click on a blue block to view detailed information on the existing reservation.
The Room Details form appears showing information on the room and its arrangement. If there is an associated drawing for this room, the plug-In zooms to the room and highlights it in the drawing.
The reservation is shown in green to indicate that it is a new unconfirmed reservation. The From and To fields in the Filter fill in with the times created by clicking and dragging in the timeline. See Using the Reservation Timeline.
If you did not specify a From and To time in the filter, the option buttons for the room are not enabled, However, the option button is automatically selected when you click and drag in the room's timeline.
The Invite Attendees form appears.
The Invite Attendees form closes and the Attendees pane now shows the selected attendees. If an attendee is scheduled for an existing confirmed reservation it is shown in blue.
If some attendees are busy during the selected time frame, the Busy attendees icon warns you of this. In this case, the attendees blue bar will overlap your new green reservation. However, all selected attendees are added to the reservation, even if they have conflicting meetings.
If you select a different date for the meeting, the attendees availability updates, so you can explore what date enables the most people to attend.
If your organization has Exchange Server, the attendees availability is shown using their Exchange calendars; otherwise the availability is based on the attendee's other reservations in Web Central.
Note: The application permits you to add more employees to a meeting than specified by the capacity of the room housing the meeting (the Maximum Capacity field of the Room Arrangements table). For example, if a room has a capacity of 3, the system enables you to add more than 3 employees to the meeting. This behavior considers the fact that some employees may be attending the meeting using remoting services and will not be physically present in the meeting room. Thus, you do not need to consider the physical space they would occupy and the capacity of the room.
Note: When you add equipment and services to a recurring reservation, these resources are added for all the occurrences. To add a resource to a single reservation, you would edit the single occurrence to add the resource. See Editing Recurring Reservations.
The Choose Equipment and Services form shows the equipment and services, such as chairs, IT support, projectors, and IT cables. The form gives the quantity that are available for the selected time frame.
As with rooms, if you do not enter a From and To time in the Filter, the application shows all resources matching the criteria you enter, and shows the existing confirmed reservations for the resource. This enables you to assess what is the best time to set up your recurring reservation based on the available time slots for the resource.
The selected equipment and services are selected for the same time period as the meeting.
Note: If you change the time in the reservation timeline for the room, the resource's time is automatically updated, as long as the resource is available. If the resource is not available during this time, then it is removed, and a Selection changed message appears at the top of the pane. Mouse over this message to see the IDs of the removed resources.
Note: If you change the time from PM to AM or from AM to PM, be sure to include the AM and PM when entering the time in the Start and End Time fields.
The Equipment and Services Details pane shows details for the selected resource. Click Close to dismiss the window.
The Add Catering form appears showing the available catering resources.
The Create Room Reservation form appears. The catering resource is added for the same time frame as the meeting.
Note: If you change the time from PM to AM or from AM to PM, be sure to include the AM and PM when entering the time in the Start and End Time fields.
Note: If you change the room reservation time on the timeline, the catering resources are adjusted if the catering time you specified is no longer within the room reservation time.
To finalize the reservation, you must confirm it.
Click Confirm.
When you click Confirm, the system checks that the reservation's start time is later than the site's current time. It also confirms that the room arrangement's or resource's announcement time is later than the site's current time.
When you submit a room or resource reservation (from Web Central), or save the reservation (from the Plug-In), the availability of the room or resources, for all dates, is checked again; if the room or resource is not available, an error message - "The room (or resource) is not available" - is shown and the process is aborted.
The View and Edit My Reservations form appears with this reservation in the list. Note that the reservation's Status is Confirmed if the room or resource reservation does not require approval. If the room arrangement or resource does require approval, the Status of Reservation value is Awaiting Approval
Managers often have assistants responsible for their calendar, for sending meeting invitations and updating meeting information. These assistants have access to the manager’s calendar via Exchange Shared Calendars, which can be accessed in Outlook. As an assistant, you able to book room reservations on your manager’s calendar, and on any calendar you are allowed to edit, according to the permissions configured in Exchange. Anytime you open a meeting from the organizer’s calendar, and you, as the current user, are allowed to change the meeting, the Room Reservation Panel is enabled.
Note these requirements must be met:
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