Do you use Room Booking Software?

[jazzy639]

I was just wondering if staff in other schools still book rooms on paper.

 

I've moved to this online system which i find very good: Room Booking System, as the teachers can see the availability of all rooms on the one page.

 

Its been used for months and the staff love it!

[Ric_]

MRBS is another popular choice.

 

It's also a damn-site cheaper! £600 for year one, then £200 for subsequent years! You must be joking.

 

Stick with the opensource MRBS IMHO and spend your money on teaching!

[free4440273]

i just created a booking form within microsoft access - share it out and mark it read-only: bob's your uncle and it costs nothing to implement...:-)

[plexer]

We also use mrbs and apart from not being able to book in advance and take in acount of 1 week half terms because of our 2 week timetable it's great.

 

Ben

[jazzy639]

I got it a bit cheaper than that as they had an offer on.

 

I just found that to be better than MRBS as teachers wanted to be able to see the availability of booking a room for the week ahead on the one page - something that MRBS didnt do. Well, they can also skip ahead weeks and view availability a week at a time. The other admins wanted control over it etc etc!

 

A simple form in access wouldnt work because:

 

the IT rooms are used at certian periods in the day for classes. At these times, the room has to be unbookable. I can set this up in the Room Booking System, something which I didnt find in other systems.

 

and last point! the system can work on a different number of periods in a day -- as it runs on 5 in our school

[GrumbleDook]

Yeah ... had a look but it could not handle what we wanted (flexibility of hours etc due to uneven times of periods)

 

I have also looked at this one and MRBS too ... both are free (donations gladly accepted of course) and seem good alternatives.

 

I know a number of people use exchange too.

[Geoff]

MRBS here too.

[ChrisH]

ICT NUT got MRBS working with a 2 week timetable.

 

@ Chris:

 

I managed to do it, after some digging. and this is how:

 

There is a file called lang.en within this file there are a number of variables set, what you are looking for is:

 

Code:

 

 

$vocab["rep_type_6"] = "n-Weekly";

 

 

Change this to:

 

Code:

 

 

$vocab["rep_type_6"] = "Bi-Weekly";

 

 

Now when adding a booking that will take place on week 1 and 3 you will need to ensure that the Bi-Weekly option is selected and on that the field "Number of weeks (for n-weekly)" has the number 2 in it.

 

When added you will see that the booking has been made for that week skipped the next one and added on the one after.

 

I agree that the field names are not the best but I am looking into changing those so they are more meaningful but that just a matter of choice really.

 

As for displaying all the weeks free Im sure someone could write the code for that.

I wrote a code mod to stop them booking to far in the future and as promised I am going to and write something for the bulk input of the time table from a file or something if nothing else has surfaced since last year.

It's one of my coding projects I am definately going to do unlike the others that get started and left

[webman]

We're currently running a pathetic (my own opinion) piece of ASP software via http://www.oarbs.com The admin interface is useless for block booking of our timetable as it doesn't have a timetable structure as such. I'm planning on creating my own but finding the time is the hardest part. Perhaps I should look at MRBS again... it got me so fustrated last time setting it up that I just left it 8O

[pete]

How do you handle people who book rooms then don't use them? That's the biggest problem with our (admittedly paper-based) system. Neither we, nor the teachers know if a room is _really_ going to be used or not, which is annoying for us (missed a potential maintenance window) and teachers.

 

A "you must reconfirm on the day or it gets marked as free" tweak might be an idea. Hmm...

[plexer]

It's not having a 2 week timetable that's the problem as I just use n-weeks and set it too 2.

 

But as we go week 1 then week 2, if there is a 1 week half term and we finish on a week 1 then we come back on a week 2 so:

 

week-1 half-term week-2 this throws the bookings out so I end having to only book ahead in half termly slots I'd rather do the whole year in one go.

 

Ben

[Sylv3r]

I have also looked at this one

 

Does a pretty good job here.

[indiegirl]

Am I one of the only ones who's set up a year's worth of weeks in Excel for our four rooms, with different colour-coding for timetabled and booked rooms?

 

Shared read-only so that staff can see, and view rooms weeks ahead, even though we'll only accept bookings up until the half term.

 

Monotonous and takes a while to set up each year, but once it's done, it's done....

[wesleyw]

We use MRBS too and I've experienced the problems with bi-weekly timetables. Now I just set up all of the periods for the year takes most of the day but its then ready. Only problems then are the timestables changing during exams thats not fun I'll tell you!

 

Wes

[ChrisC]

We basically have an access db holding all the rooms, the timetabled lessons, and the weeks (you just type a few more in towards the end of term).

 

It is then linked into our intranet so theres a nice asp front end that lets people know what periods are free, they can only book a period where there is no entry in the database, then once they have booked it, only they (or us admins) can edit or delete their booking. So it saves a lot of hastle we used to have with a spreadsheet/table being deleted/moved/edited and confusions being made.

 

Chris

[alan-d]

We us Digirez although the price has trebled since we bought it 3 years ago - they must be doing well!

[jazzy639]

Wow, didnt relise this was a hot topic!

 

the thing i liked about the system we're on is that it was all set up for us. all that we did was fill in the rooms and timetable info and it worked from day one. we were willing to pay as i dont have to host anything or mess around with php, it just works! simple!

[Ric_]

@jazzy639: If you want anything else like this, I'll happilyu come and install it for £600

[jazzy639]

nah, ur ok

 

the room booking system we use is much more suited to our school and there are features that the staff use a lot like:

quick view of whats available - over 10 rooms - displayed clearly on the timetable

we have different sorts of rooms which are sorted in categories and are displayed efficiently using the timetable

room owners can see who is in their room

admin likes the amount of control he's got and the statistics

... only to name a few

 

i will be definately sticking to what ive got!

 

if your concerned about the price, speak to them and see if they'll lower it - they did for my school as well as the offer

[john]

Would it be possible to either do something like this in Sharepoint services or customise this for say Minibusses rather than Rooms? We have paper forms for Mini-Busses at present, and you have to wander to get the form etc, but an on-line one would be simpler for us to check to book it in for a service etc... as its fight fight fight over the book, but this could be the solution.

[beeswax]

there is a room booking add-on to sharepoint, but I can't remember where to locate it on the microsoft site. I've a copy on my pen drive which I can let you have (it's free, after all).

beeswax

[john]

That would be excellent if you could as I am going to play with setting a new Intranet up this term, for launch in Sept, and its going to be sharepoint based, so I could make a start with that.

[beeswax]

you may find this useful, as I seem to have left my pen drive at the office.

beeswax

[john]

That sounds brill beeswax, just what I am looking for, when I finally get all my server setup, that will be my first module to be played with!

 

Thanks

[MrDylan]

We used to have an Excel Spreadsheet on the network that teachers could check and we'd book them.

 

Ended up with people booking the wrong days and then having conflicts, been given lists of loads of dates to book or asked to remember to book rooms weeks in advance that we didn't have timetables for and even being asked by staff if people were off or weren't using a room they'd booked for any reason.

 

Ended up taking so much of our time, and being asked things we had no idea what the answers were we paid someone, only about £150 to make a web based booking system.

 

Now people log on and get a list of rooms with timetables, showing if it's booked or whatnot and they book things themselves.

 

The only problem now is people complain they can't get in because other staff have booked loads.

 

Not my problem I say, nothing I can do, nothing to do with me, take it up with the purpetrator.