SharePoint room and equipment reservations?

cokecan · 25 Feb 2013 at 14:25

Hi Guys

I'm looking for a bit of help/suggestions into a central room and equipment reservations type system.

We currently use SharePoint 2007 and have simply created a calendar for each room we have that's bookable and added these to Outlook for each member of staff (roughly 30 people). This works well as everyone can make bookings via Outlook, however we now have a need to start booking equipment and I do wonder if there is a better solution available?

A bit more background here: As noted, we have a SharePoint 2007 site but it is currently hosted and maintained by an external source so while I am an admin of our site, the parent site and any sub-sites created, I do not have access to the actual infrastructure it's running on which also means no SharePoint Designer

I have managed to get the external source to install the MS Room and Equipment Reservations template for me but I've quickly found this to be VERY buggy! Literally modifying the Reservations Calendar view from week to month causes a server error when browsing to that page!

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to go from here? Other more complete paid for templates or fixes for the current MS one? Unfortunately the external source has invested quite heavily into the infrastructure over the last 12 months and have no plans to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 so I can't take advantage of the resource booking feature built into this.

Ideally I would like to either keep it within SharePoint or run a system that would integrate with our AD for user authentication.

Thanks in advance

Madmrcopper · 25 Feb 2013 at 14:56

Cokecan,

Yeah its a bit of a problem and I'm in a similar situation. Our new owners use Outlook scheduling feature. Once we where integrated they tried pushing us down the that route but we resisted as we found our SharePoint calenders much more reliable than there exchange setup. Only way to make it fully integrated was to upgrade SharePoint to 2010+ or get a additional webpart.

You can actually edit the calendar list to give options in SharePoint to add fields to book things but these wont then propagate to outlook and see in any calendar connections there.

cokecan · 25 Feb 2013 at 14:59

Madmrcopper said:
Cokecan,

Yeah its a bit of a problem and I'm in a similar situation. Our new owners use Outlook scheduling feature. Once we where integrated they tried pushing us down the that route but we resisted as we found our SharePoint calenders much more reliable than there exchange setup. Only way to make it fully integrated was to upgrade SharePoint to 2010+ or get a additional webpart.

You can actually edit the calendar list to give options in SharePoint to add fields to book things but these wont then propagate to outlook and see in any calendar connections there.

Thanks for the reply

Yeah that was going to be my next stop....see if I can create a custom calendar in SharePoint with the necessary fields (dropdowns?) for people to fill out. I guess at the very least people could view the calendar in Outlook to see whats booked, just not add anything to it

Madmrcopper · 25 Feb 2013 at 15:02

Cokecan,

Unfortunately it wont show the custom fields in Outlook just a standard calendar booking.

Its all a bit disappointing really but a good reason to upgrade to 2013

R.O.S.S.I · 25 Feb 2013 at 15:27

So does that functionality only come with Sharepoint 2013, or Exchange 2013?

I only ask as i'm going to be trying to set up a Sharepoint site as an intranet at my works and want similar features to what you describe! Not sure we're up for making the jump to Exchange 2013 yet though if that's the case as we had major problems when coming from Exchange 2007 to 2010!

Madmrcopper · 25 Feb 2013 at 15:34

2010 upwards you can link exchange calenders with SharePoint calenders to get the additional schedule assistant additional functionality. If your upgrading at the moment your better off just going 2013.

R.O.S.S.I · 25 Feb 2013 at 16:47

Cool, will look at 2013 then!

cokecan · 27 Feb 2013 at 16:09

Madmrcopper said:
Cokecan,

Unfortunately it wont show the custom fields in Outlook just a standard calendar booking.

Its all a bit disappointing really but a good reason to upgrade to 2013

Yeah I meant that people could at least view the calendar in Outlook without adding anything to it there.

After a bit of digging it looks like I might have an option of using an updated version of SharePoint (2010 or 2013 I believe) from our other external source. They mainly use it to present a web front end to an AD filestore in a browser, but I'm waiting to hear back as to whether they'll let me create and maintain a site on the system. Fingers crossed as I can then use the built in booking features and have better integration with Outlook 2010/2013!