Monthly Archives: October 2010

Booking Improved

One of shortcomings of OffiServ’s booking & lending module was that it allowed only reserving resources with a half hour granularity. Now we improved that by introducing scheduling for any time range. We have also made several other refinements.

Changes in Reservation Form

The changes start from reservation form.

Until now time could be chosen from a combo box where only discrete values like 09:00 or 13:30 where available. As you can see on the picture above, now it is possible also to enter any arbitrary time like 15:25 or even 17:21, if you wish.

New Schedule Grid

The following changes are related to the schedule grid. Now it is capable of displaying reservations and selections for arbitrary times provided in reservation form.

The picture above presents a page of booking module. Below the reservation form there is the new grid. The grid contains rows (one for each resource) that contain time entries. The row presents when the resource is available and when reserved.

The latest changes brings also improvements to grid’s header. Passed time is shown in dark yellow, future time in light yellow while current time in orange.

The grid is used in the following way. When user picks start and end time of booking in the reservation form then the selection is drawn on the grid. The selection is presented as thin bars on resources rows. Green bars indicate that the resource in selected period for time is available. Red bars mark a conflict of selected time with already made reservations presented as light red entries in resource’s row.

Generally green entries in a resource row indicate that the resource is available. A user can pick a resource on grid by clicking it. Then the whole row becomes darker. It can be seen on picture above: third row is selected while first and second not.

The blue color of the second row indicates that the resource is not available because e.g. it is in maintenance or is just being repaired.

When a user moves mouse over any kind of entries on grid there will appear a balloon that describes given entry. The picture below shows description of reservation that is pointed by a mouse cursor.

When a user moves mouse over a red selection the balloon will show with which reservations the selection is in conflict.

After selecting both a period of time and an available resource a user can type a reason or description of booking and then click Reserve button. This will submit reservation to OffiServ server. After a while the grid will update and just requested reservation will be marked as booked.

Summary

We have introduced several changes and improvements to booking & lending module. The most important one is arbitrary time of reservations. We hope that it will bring more benefits and comfort of use to you and your coworkers.

I’d like to suggest our previous post that presents resource management more wider: Booking Shared Equipment using OffiServ.

Import resources from spreadsheet using Drag and Drop

We have a piece of good news for all users who would like to manage company resources booking using OffiServ. Now you can import your list of conference rooms or mobile phones from Excel or OpenOffice file using simple drag and drop.

Drag and Drop Resources Import

Users often use spreadsheets to store and manage lists. This is why OffiServ introduced drag and drop resources import from a spreadsheet.You can import a two column list of resources to OffiServ. First column is a resource name, the second – a resource description.

Note: currently the drag and drop import works on Windows platform. It was tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers.

To import list of resources into a resources group click import action beside the resource group you want to import resources into.

Then select the items in your spreadsheet. Do not include the header row.

Now you can drag and drop the items into the OffiServ table. Using Microsoft Internet Explorer you can also copy the items and paste them using right-click menu Paste option.

Please note that drag and drop from Microsoft Excel requires you to drag the border of the selection while in OpenOffice.org you can drag interior of the selection area as well.

Once you dragged or pasted your items you will see them in the table.

Now just click import to import the items as new resources. If the resources have been imported without issues, you will see the yellow confirmation box.

There is also a link to move to Resource Management where you can review, modify or delete particular resources, including those just imported.

Now every employee can book one of the imported conference rooms using Resources – Conference Rooms menu item.

Summary

Importing resources from spreadsheets is useful in many companies where Excel or OpenOffice are used by Facility Managers or IT Managers to store equipment information. Using OffiServ’s drag and drop import feature it is now even simpler to add or update resources available to employees for reservation or lending in OffiServ.

OffiServ Weekly Update: Build #548

We foster open communication to our customers. This is why we update you weekly what’s new and what’s been changed in OffiServ and what are we preparing for you for the near future.

New Features and Improvements

Custom Fields: due to popular demand we have delivered custom fields support for tickets. For now we support text, multiline text and choice-from-list fields. Please try them out and give us feedback! We are preparing some introduction in a separate blog post.
Improved format of e-mail notifications
Added “last updated” field to tickets lists
Added e-mail notifications for new reservations

Bug Fixes

Fixed some issues in periodic actions (cron)
Fixed some issues in e-mail notifications

What’s next

In next few weeks you will experience the following new features and improvements:

Done: Custom fields support: some customers requested for possibility to define custom fields in tickets and resources.
In progress: Internationalization improvements: french translation (in “beta” stage) and fix some internationalization issues in e-mail notifications.
Implement recurring reservations. They are useful, for instance, for booking conference rooms for recurring meetings.
Add possibility to cancel tickets, e.g. duplicated or rejected ones.
Add custom fields support to resources
Improve resource handover process to make it a real replacement for handover protocol document

Next update is coming next Friday. Stay tuned!

OffiServ Weekly Update: Build #530