Effective Tool for Calendaring, Planning and Room Booking in Microsoft SharePoint
Challenge
The Windana Society is a non-profit organization with more than a hundred employees working in the drug and alcohol recovery sector, based in Melbourne, Australia. The adopted business processes required to provide employees with a tool that would allow them to immediately find out who is available for a project at a particular date and time. Specifically, it was necessary to display the annual leave calendar color coded for different departments, so as an employee could quickly learn which of his colleagues are on leave. There was also a need in the second interface, which allows staff members to quickly indicate if a certain colleague is out of the office at the moment through a quick and easy view.
At the same time there was another issue called for a solution – room booking. The company needed a product that provides a visually rich and secure booking system for offices, rooms, practitioners and appointments.
Marcel Dorembus, Windana’s head of IT department, comments on choosing the solution. “Ideally, we would like to have a single solution for both problems, though understood that this is not easy to find such one. Eventually, the task was even more complex than we first thought. We analyzed a number of products available at the market, and found out that our requirements are restrictive for the majority of them. We ended up with just three solutions in our short-list. After testing, Virto Ajax Calendar appeared to be the only product that solves both tasks of Windana effectively enough.”
What is Virto Ajax Calendar
Virto Calendar is designed to provide SharePoint users with extended features for calendar planning and management that are not available in the standard SharePoint calendar. It substantially expands the functionality of the default Microsoft SharePoint calendar by a wide range of features and capabilities.
With Virto Ajax Calendar users can use not only SharePoint lists but also SQL tables as a calendar data source. Besides, Virto Ajax Calendar supports MOSS Audience Targeting that allows restricting the access to list events only to specified users and user groups, and enables flexible customization of the event tooltip information. In addition, it provides extremely user friendly and simple interface that allows creating new calendar events with a single click, and using drug & drop to change event timeframe.
How it solves the problem
Marcel Dorembus describes how Virto Ajax Calendar is used for solving room booking problem. “We created a calendar for each room, and displayed them on a single page using Virto Ajax Calendar. This was enough to satisfy our simplest requirement, which was for staff members to quickly and easily click and drag to create a room booking. For other types of bookings, which required security in regards to the client name etc. we linked to another (secure) locked list from the basic room booking entry in the generally accessible system.”
“Today Virto Ajax Calendar is used every day by Windana staff members. It has finally replaced theree thick paper books, and has become really indispensable. An important thing is that we managed to implement the solution extremely quickly, that was achievable due to very intuitive and very easy to use interface, and, as a consequence, almost no need for any special training.”, concludes Marcel.
