Meeting Room Booking Blues

Hi there,
I'm a software developer who would greatly appreciate your input on an idea that I genuinely think will make your life a little bit easier, allowing you to concentrate on more important day-to-day things than booking meetings.

In my experience it's never been an easy thing to do. I worked somewhere where the room schedules were literally diaries within in the rooms which you had to hunt around for. Another place used a different electronic system for the room schedules. Generally, I have found that you have to align people's calendars with room calendars and even then you don't know if any of the people are due to be on holiday when you find a matching slot.

Sure if you have all your calendars in Outlook you can use the scheduling assistant - which is excellent by the way. But there is still something missing. I find you still have to look around to find an appropriate meeting room and even then I'm unsure if somebody is going to be in the office on that day.

Perhaps your experience has not been so negative as mine, perhaps you haven't had these troubles. I'd still love to hear from you because I'm thinking about building something and if it won't be useful I'd rather not waste my time.

So... What if you and your colleagues could simply search for a meeting, like this:

"next monday afternoon Steve Barrett, Clare Whys, Ryan Smith"
or
"2pm tomorrow Tom, Brian, Julie, me +projector"
or
"now me, Julie +flipchart"
...

(+ means this is really important. i.e. if I can't get a room with a projector then find one!)

I hope by now you have some questions, perhaps think this is crazy, impossible, etc - but what if there was no calendar required to book a room. What if you could just ask and something would figure it out, do all the hard work, book it and let you know. Saving you time and hassle.

Would you find this useful?
Can you see your company buying this?
Why won't this work?

Many thanks,
Anthony Fielding

[Atlanta Z3]

My company expects admins to be able to do this in their sleep.  They would not purchase.

[msmarieh]

In our Outlook, rooms are set up as resources and can easily be included in the search with the Scheduling assistant.

Definitely no way they would go for something of this nature.