Frequently Asked Question

at RBGE, some of our rooms are self service - anyone can book them if they are free.  

Others are Managed - which means they have a set of owner(s), and only those owner(s) can approve bookings.  Other users can attempt to book, but the booking will be subject to approval.  This article outlines how to manage a managed room.  It assumes you've already been setup as an admin.  if you have not been, please speak to ETS, and ask them to set you up.  

Managing a Room

The behaviour depends on who tries to book it:

• a room is setup with a set of owners.
• people in this list can book the room, and the bookings will be accepted automatically.
  • they can do this either by setting up a meeting, and adding the room as a "room" on the meeting (similarly to any other meeting room)
  • or they can go into the room's calendar, and insert meetings directly there.
• people outside this list will be able to setup a booking for the room, but the booking request will be set as "Tentative", pending approval. In this case, an email will be sent to all owners of the room asking them to accept or reject it. This can be done very similarly to how an outlook meeting invite is accepted / rejected.
• The request will look like this:
• • Note, the request is sent to multiple users, and only 1 user needs to respond.  You can see if an item has already been responded to, as in outlook the top of the request will have a note saying "accepted by X, at Y".  - and the calendar event will have a solid bar next to it, instead of a hashed one.  If the request has already been accepted, you can just delete.  Here's an example of an already approved request (compare to above)
  • 
• If its unavailable (clash) they will receive a decline, with details of the clash. - inc details of the clashing meeting - in case they want to negotiate a swap.

Booking a room, without the event appearing in your calendar:

• Open up the calendar in outlook that you want to put the event into, and then just “drop” the event in – as shown in the below screenshot. In more detail
• select the time period needed in the calendar,
• then either click “new appointment” at the top right, or alternatively just start typing, and an appointment will be auto created for you at that time.

Other capabilities:

Rooms can be setup for shared use - allowing multiple people to book them at once.  

To do this - speak to ETS, and ask them to setup the room for shared use.

ETS note - you'll need to setup the room in exchange admin centre, to allow conflicting bookings.  You'll be able to set the maximum number of conflicting bookings allowed.  

It's not possible to set some events on a room as needing exclusive use, and others shared, however.  It must be one or the other.  If a mix is needed, that will need to be manually enforced by venue managers.