Resource Booking In Outlook And SharePoint

Most companies and organizations need a system for booking common resources. The booking should be easy to handle for the users, doublebookings must be avoided and it should be possible to book supplies with each order and to see an overview of the bookings. Above these basics kalmstrom.com Business Solutions can add an almost infinite number of features, depending on your needs.

SharePoint app solution
In the demo below Peter Kalmstrom, Microsoft certified SharePoint expert, shows how to create a simple booking system in SharePoint. It is intended for a smaller company only, but it gives you the basics. You can read more about it in the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website.



Outlook standard solution
If you need something more advanced but still want to use a standard solution, I suggest the kalmstrom.com Outlook-addon Calendar Browser. This application gives you a lot more than the simple SharePoint solution shown in the demo, and you can use it with many resouces that are booked by hundreds of people.

Still Calendar Browser is easy to understand and administrate. With Calendar Browser users can search for free resources and see resource descriptions, and for the management there are all kinds of reports on future as well as passed resource usage.

To choose a standard product like Calendar Browser gives many benefits. It is used by many, so it is in our interest to develop the application to support and take advantage of changes in the Microsoft software we build on. That way we can keep our customers for many years – among our current Community Members are companies that have used Calendar Browser for ten years!

Sponsored solution
However, sometimes the standard solution does not have enough features. Then kalmstrom.com Business Solutions offers a possibility to sponsor the addition of the missing features to the standard product.

Such a sponsorship has paid for part of the development cost for the next version of Calendar Browser. This version will have several new features sponsored by a big organization who wants to use Calendar Browser but needs the extra features. Thanks to the sponsorship all earlier Calendar Browser users will also get the added features when they upgrade their installations.

Custom solution
In some cases no standard solution is suitable, not even with sponsored additional features.  When an organization has so many special requests that a totally new solution is the best alternative, kalmstrom.com Business Solutions can offer a custom product built on Outlook or SharePoint.

As you see there are several possibilities to solve the problem of how best to book corporate resources, from the simple SharePoint solution (which any SharePoint admin should be able to create with the help of Peter's tutorial) to standard solutions that are easy to learn and manage and further on to custom solutions that require extensive expert knowledge.

Kate Kalmström
Marketing and Documentation
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions