Room and Resource Management - Any Real Life Users?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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I am currently investigating whether or not Domino Room and Resource management is suitable for my organisation.

The hope would be for the system to maintain bookings for meeting rooms. Obviously it is capable of this, but our current booking procedure requires a great degree of flexibility because as with any organisation, meetings can overrun, start late, have to get moved at the last minute, or unannounced client visits which require a meeting room straight away.

From my testing of the product, I am concerned about it’s flexibility in terms of changing bookings.

For example, if a room is booked from 1pm-2pm by one user, and then from 2pm-2:30pm by another (which would be commonplace) and then the first users meeting overruns to 2:15pm. In this instance, at present, our reception who manage the meeting rooms would simply find another free room and put the second user in there and update their paper diary.

With RnR our reception would either have to cancel the current reservation and hope the user reads the notification and then finds themself another room, or they have access to all users calendars and go in and update their calendar to reflect a new room.

If the RnR calendar isn’t kept up to date, it won’t reflect the current availability of rooms.

So, really, I guess I’d like to know if anyone reading this has implemented RnR in a situation where things change quickly, and how they have adapted to work with this. The prefect world outcome would be that no meeting ever took place unannounced, and that no meeting ever overran, but clients come first, and if they need longer, they need longer.

Thanks

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Subject: Room and Resource Management - Any Real Life Users?

We began using the R&R database to manage 8-9 conference rooms spread over 4 locations around 3 years ago. I’ve found that the R&R database is being enhanced by lotus each release. So far were happy with it, and have removed the responsibility from 2 out of 3 receptionists for managing the rooms.I’ve found that if a meeting runs long, the person being bumped for whatever reason, will check with the receptionist for a free room, and she will then book that new room. Sometimes she delete that person’s old reservation, sometimes not.

If I walk into a room that I have reserved, and it’s occupied, I size up who has it first. Director or higher, they get it. Anyone else, I’ll interrupt and ask if their almost finished, most people then apologize and wrap up their meeting.

Yes, the R&R db could use some enhancements, as no system is perfect, the things it can’t do are minimal compared to the time is saved EVERYONE.

It’s easy to reserve / Extend / Move / Delete a reservation all from your personal calendar.

Overall were happy and it reduced the load on the receptionists.

The 1 receptionist required that all reservations need approval, and a form is filled out as well that indicates attendees, agenda, and priority so that they can determine if they should kick someone from the room & override the first-come first-serve format

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Subject: Thanks Mark

We’ve decided not to use RnR, it’s not flexible enough for the fast changing needs of our office.

Shame really, would have been nice.