We have a total of 7 conference rooms that we're trying to come up with a simple reservation system for. The biggest concerns we have for the system we go with are ease of use for end-users, security, and integration ability with Outlook. So far, the 2 routes that we are exploring are:
Outlook Resources:
With this option, we would be setting up 7 Outlook resources, each one for a separate conference room, allowing users to send meeting requests to them. One of the biggest drawbacks however, from the articles I've read, an instance of Outlook would need to be open for each account, or an auto-accept event sink needs to be configured on each one of our Exchange servers. Neither option appeals to us.
Sharepoint Calendars (Room and Conference Room Reservations template)
While this is a more open option, it does not integrate well with Outlook. If I was to schedule a room from the site itself, the meeting will be made on the shared calendar thats linked to it within Outlook, BUT it will not show up in MY calendar unless I copy it. When creating the meeting request, I do not see an option to invite additional users either.
If I did the opposite however, where I scheduled a room from the shared calendar in Outlook, I can't pick a specific conference room when creating the request, it defaults to one of them.
What other options do we have for this issue with what we've got? We'd like to stay away from 3rd party products at this time, unless there are ones that make specialized templates for this kind of problem.
Most of our desktops are running XP with Office 2003, and our server is running MOSS 2007.
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