Meeting Room Booking System

RDRGSJ00

Hello,
Has anyone in the community ever developed a meeting room booking system with Smartsheets? I found an awesome system from Prodactive on YouTube at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT9Px8evy00

But understandably, it doesn't tell you how to create it. From what I can tell it requires a sheet, form, calendar app, dynamic view, and a dashboard to bring it all together. Any information is greatly appreciated.

Brian_Richardson

Frankly I'd just pay the guy :-)

But, you could do something relatively simple by setting up the following:

1 - Setup a sheet with the meeting rooms as a dropdown and a start/end date, in addition to any other information that you're looking for

2 - Setup filters for each meeting room on the sheet

3 - Setup a Dynamic View for the sheet. It will include the filters. Be sure to enable entering new bookings. You can also setup any other fields and logic that you want to work on the slide-out edit panel in Dynamic View.

4 - Optional - if you use Google Calendar you can go to the Calendar View on the sheet and sync to a Google Calendar, which can then be shared to whomever you wish. Note that it's an "outbound" sync, in other words you cannot make changes to the Google Calendar and have those changes sync back to Smartsheet. It's view only essentially.

5 - In your sheet, setup a formula that looks to see if the date range for a room is already booked called "Conflicting Meetings". For this formula I'm assuming the column for event name is called Name, the meeting room dropdown is called Room, dates are Start Date and End Date, and times are Start Time and End Time. You'll also need to add the Created system column. Once you copy in this formula, right click the cell that you typed into and select Convert to Column Formula. The formula for that column would be =JOIN(COLLECT(Name:Name,Room:Room, Room@row, [Start Date]:[Start Date],>=[Start Date]@row, [End Date]:[End Date],⇐[End Date]@row, [Start Time]:[Start Time], >=[Start Time]@row, [End Time}:[End Time], ⇐[End Time]@row, [Created]:[Created], ⇐Created@row), ",")

Any time a new row is entered, the formula above will collect the names of the events from earlier in the sheet where the dates and times fall within the same dates and times of the new event, and the room matches. The column will show a list of conflicting events with the names separated by a ,

6 - Setup an automation to send an Update Request to the requestor (can get that through the Created By column, which you'll need to add), triggered if the row changes or is added, and if Conflicting Meetings is not blank. The Update Request email can say something like "you just booked a meeting in a room with a conflict, please select a different room". Provide the Room and dates/times fields. If someone books a conflict, they'll get an email that allows them to update their choices.

This should give you a simple management system. Users will need to use the Dynamic View and filter for the meeting rooms they are interested in, to see what has space. They can then add their event. If they accidentally book over someone else, they'll get an email asking them to adjust their event as the room is already booked.

I'm sure Prodactive's solution is more robust and probably (I didn't watch it) includes fanciness like reports that show open rooms. Again, if he did the hard work to come up with a good solution, you might want to consider engaging him to build it for you with advanced features that I didn't get into here.

Rich Coles

🙋‍♂️ We have and we're a very friendly bunch! Feel free to give us a shout as I know this solution stumped some pretty advanced users who tried to recreate it for a client and in the end asked us to help out!

And @Brian_Richardson, love your comment, thanks!

RDRGSJ00

Thanks for the information. I'll give it a try.