Alternative to BROMCOM room booking

[E_G_R2]

Hi,

 

we have an issue where staff are able to double book rooms in BROMCOM which as you can imagine causes no end of problem.

 

Does anyone out there us an alternative room booking system (online) and if so which one and does it use the wonders of WONDE to link to BROMCOMS timetable.

 

Alternatively does anyone know of a way of 100% stopping staff double booking in BROMCOM.

 

Cheers

[leegcvcc]

oh no... this has sent a shudder down my spine pre-migration to Bromcom!

 

Have you contacted Bromcom support?

Edited March 7, 2025 by leegcvcc

[PotNoodleTech]

Yeh I'd try and get bromcom to fix it first rather than paying for some more software!

[E_G_R2]

Apparently we've tried but its not fixed. Block bookings seem to be the problem, they can over write existing bookings. There is a warning but staff just ignore the screen message!!!

 

We are looking at the school cloud option as we use them for parents evening.

[leegcvcc]

Apparently we've tried but its not fixed. Block bookings seem to be the problem, they can over write existing bookings. There is a warning but staff just ignore the screen message!!!

 

We are looking at the school cloud option as we use them for parents evening.

 

Not sure they support Bromcom. In fact they don't, but there is a manual import option, but what you have to do to populate that might be arduous. Hopefully this is just isolated to your site, for whatever reason, as it seems a huge issue if the same for everyone?

[E_G_R2]

This is what we were told by BROMCOM

 

"They say it is a staff training issue.

Staff have to either ignore the fact that the room is not free and book anyway

Actively untick –‘only show free rooms’ to find the one they want. You can’t factor this in!

Or when booking a recurring event, not check all subsequent dates .

It may be free this week/next, but not 3 weeks’ time.

 

It is a staff training issue as far as they are concerned."

 

Its easier to herd cats than train staff if their is a loophole

[PotNoodleTech]

What a joke.

[E_G_R2]

Not sure they support Bromcom. In fact they don't, but there is a manual import option, but what you have to do to populate that might be arduous. Hopefully this is just isolated to your site, for whatever reason, as it seems a huge issue if the same for everyone?

 

Links for parents evenings no problem.

 

We have dropped most of the 'one stop shop' stuff as they just don't work as well as some of the other products out there.

 

I'm almost wishing we had SIMS

[Bromcom_Alastair]

Due to another post on a similar topic, we created a survey to get feedback on the current One-Stop-Shop offering.

We're interested in this feedback to help add features to the existing offerings and hopefully avoid having to go elsewhere.

 

https://forms.office.com/e/CaLKLdrk7u

 

Survey is currently open until the end of this week, but we'll be conducting similar ones periodically to try and track where we are.

[TheCookieMonster]

"They say it is a staff training issue.

Staff have to either ignore the fact that the room is not free and book anyway

Actively untick –‘only show free rooms’ to find the one they want. You can’t factor this in!

Or when booking a recurring event, not check all subsequent dates .

It may be free this week/next, but not 3 weeks’ time.

It is a staff training issue as far as they are concerned."

 

Is this second/third hand advice? May want to check with Bromcom directly if you can or post it on the Community to see what people say there.

 

Could you just turn off the automatic allocation? You'll have to approve everything but then you get that control back I guess.

[supportman]

Due to another post on a similar topic, we created a survey to get feedback on the current One-Stop-Shop offering.

We're interested in this feedback to help add features to the existing offerings and hopefully avoid having to go elsewhere.

 

https://forms.office.com/e/CaLKLdrk7u

 

Survey is currently open until the end of this week, but we'll be conducting similar ones periodically to try and track where we are.

 

Filled in but didn't see anything on room bookings which is a huge area that needs improvement.

[leegcvcc]

So what do people use for bookings if they aren't using Bromcom room bookings? Keen to help the OP (and me )

[E_G_R2]

Is this second/third hand advice? May want to check with Bromcom directly if you can or post it on the Community to see what people say there.

 

Could you just turn off the automatic allocation? You'll have to approve everything but then you get that control back I guess.

 

This was what our DM was told when they spoke to BROMCOM about it.

[supportman]

So what do people use for bookings if they aren't using Bromcom room bookings? Keen to help the OP (and me )

 

We looked into https://www.roombookingsystem.co.uk/ which used to be awesome and was well liked in school but they don't support Wonde sadly due to some weird limitation on the timetable.

 

Basically they said it wasn't Bromcoms fault, it was Wonde not allowing the data.

 

Saying that roombookingsystem was taken over by TES and I believe the excellent support they had is now rubbish. So that's a shame.

 

For now we are sticking with Bromcom's feature as it seems they are finally waking up and looking into development of it.

[mthomas08]

I'm sure bromcom can be permissioned so staff can't see it. Maybe that would be the solution.

[leegcvcc]

We looked into https://www.roombookingsystem.co.uk/ which used to be awesome and was well liked in school but they don't support Wonde sadly due to some weird limitation on the timetable.

 

Basically they said it wasn't Bromcoms fault, it was Wonde not allowing the data.

 

Saying that roombookingsystem was taken over by TES and I believe the excellent support they had is now rubbish. So that's a shame.

 

For now we are sticking with Bromcom's feature as it seems they are finally waking up and looking into development of it.

Well the support is rubbish now, granted, but the product is actually amazing! Shifting to Bromcom bookings is like going back 15 years for us. Not looking forward to this in the slightest as to run it properly needs intervention and someone's time

[Bromcom_Alastair]

This was what our DM was told when they spoke to BROMCOM about it.

 

Hi there - if your data manager spoke to Bromcom support, it likely would have been recorded in a case. If you want to message me the case reference, I'll gladly take a look at it and see what else we could do.

[timbo343]

So what do people use for bookings if they aren't using Bromcom room bookings? Keen to help the OP (and me )

SchoolBooking - https://www.schoolbooking.com/. Works great for us.

[taz]

We use Salamander to pull timetables from Bromcom and populate Office 365 calendars.

Then staff who want an extra booking just book via their O365 calendars (or they email the cover manager who does the booking for them).

 

There are caveats - we have gone a bit backwards since moving to Bromcom but not unmanageably so:

 

1) Salamander cannot pull exam timetables any more from the MIS - this is a Bromcom limitation.  We got around this by releasing the Bromcom student app so students can see their exam timetable as a tile.

 

2) room changes via cover are updated in O365 for the teachers and pupils calendars. However, there is double entry for the room's calendar in O365 - this is a Salamander limitation.

E.g. if Class A moves from Room 1 to Room 2, Salamander can create an entry in both Room 1 and Room 2 calendars but they cannot remove the entry in Room 1. It looks like classes are booked across multiple rooms, and rooms are full when they aren't. We work around this by saying all changes go to our Cover Manager so at least one person sees all room requests and can manually edit them.  That said, it isn't ideal as we've now created a new job for our poor cover manager. 

 

3) room closures via Bromcom are not pulled through to O365. This is a Salamander limitation, currently on a dev list.

 

3) we have 1600+ calendars to sync. Salamander runs the scheduled sync between Bromcom and O365 calendars every 2 hours to avoid killing the system.  This isn't an issue for us but if you have a lot of quick ad hoc changes this might be a problem.  

 

We looked at a lot of other systems but almost all of them did not integrate with Bromcom or Office 365. They operated as standalone, which then creates a job for room changes via cover, exams etc. to manage. It also moved us away from the "all events in one calendar" model. If the room closures and exam timetables can be brought through in a future dev by Salamander/Bromcom, then it would do everything we need.    

Edited April 7, 2025 by taz
clarification