Classroom Bookings - repurposed for desk booking

[srochford]

I work in ICT at Imperial College London. Currently we're all working from home but we're looking towards the time when people can come back on site. ICT is based in an open plan office with about 300 desks; no-one has an allocated desk although the floor is zoned and people generally sit in their own zone.

 

I'm trying to find a way of allowing staff to book a desk so that people will only come on site when they're sure that there's a "safe" desk available and I've been looking at ClassroomBookings from @webman

 

So far, it's looking promising; I can use "room" to mean "desk" and I've set up the day to give bookable periods (I've gone for 1 hour slots for the moment but will probably change that later)

 

The one thing which I'm not too keen on is that I end up with a long list of my 300 desks; is there any way I can split this up? In a school I imagine you might split classrooms into buildings (certainly the schools I've worked in had more than 1 building and it would have been good to show rooms split by building rather than one long list) I'd like to be able to show the zone and then the desks or split in some other way. I tried adding a custom field but although that gets shown you don't seem to be able to group on that.

 

Also, I know that it doesn't currently support LDAP login but has anyone added this for themselves? CodeIgniter supports it and I think I could probably add in the necessary code but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel if it's already been done!

 

Thanks to @webman for all his work on this.

 

Steve

[webman]

Hi Steve!

 

Yes, I agree that the the long list of 300 desks isn't ideal at all!

 

It was never intended to 'support' that many bookable things - but adding tags, categories or parent/child relationship functionality, so users can browse/filter them, is definitely something that I've thought about (and been asked about!) before, but have never gotten round to adding it. Especially in larger organisations, as well - it's definitely something that's made it more of a priority.

 

Regardling LDAP: again, it's another popular request and would be a great addition. CodeIgniter doesn't have native support for LDAP (it doesn't even have native authentication functionality) - so these things have to be added via custom or third-party libraries.

 

What's your timescale for implementing it, if it had one or both of those features? And is there a budget?

[srochford]

Timescale is probably "yesterday" but realistically I'd guess it's a month or so away (we have about 8,000 staff in total. The plan is to bring back on site those who need to be there ASAP and bring back others more slowly. Most of ICT probably won't come back for a long time).

 

Budget's much harder to quantify. Our policy is "buy not build" so we definitely could pay for it but I have no budget control (and may not have a job much longer - I'm one of the people targeted for redundancy https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/imperial-covid-19-researchers-criticise-plans-cut-75-ict-jobs#)

[webman]

Thanks for the response! OK. Sorry to hear that your job is at risk! Very concerning. I hope it doesn't come to that, or if it does, you can quickly find another.

 

For the other stuff - leave it with me, I'll look at my workload for the next few weeks and see what's going to be possible. I presume you're using the 'One day at a time' view setting, as you mentioned the page full of rooms (desks).

 

Re: LDAP: if you could import accounts from CSV (to create the users), but just have the password authenticated via an LDAP bind/connection when people log in - would that be sufficient?

 

Another option might be to look at using MRBS instead - it natively supports areas and rooms, time slots (rather than periods), and LDAP.

[webman]

Hi @srochford, just dropping in to let you know that I'm making version 2.3.0 beta available now, which contains experimental support for LDAP authentication if you're still pursuing classroombookings for your needs. Room categories will also be coming soon.

 

Get 2.3.0-beta.1.zip

 

More details

[webman]

I've made another update to this which allows you to specify the full format of the Bind DN for the authenticating user.

 

Get 2.3.0-beta.2.zip