Enabling room reservations

As a BMC Helix Digital Workplace administrator, you can allow end users to reserve assets, such as conference rooms or guest rooms. 

Scenarios for reserving rooms

The following scenarios describe the need for reserving a room:

• Pete wants to reserve a conference room in the Houston office for a training session with 20 customers. He wants a room with a white board and a projector. In BMC Helix Digital Workplace on his tablet, he clicks the Reservations calendar icon, and searches for a conference room for the date and location with a white board, a projector, and a capacity of 20 people. Finding a room on the first floor, he reserves the room. 
• Pete's company provides a free massage benefit to its employees. To schedule a 30-minute massage, Pete opens the BMC Helix Digital Workplace end user console. He opens the Locations tab, and selects his office location. On the floor map, he selects the massage room, selects an available slot of of time, and reserves the massage.

To configure room assets for reservation

Perform the following steps to configure room assets to be allowed for reservation: 

The following video shows how to prepare room assets for reservation and enable the option for reserving room assets in BMC Helix Digital Workplace:

 https://youtu.be/_E_zK33KcAE

To configure the mailbox server 

As a system administrator, perform the following steps:

1. Set up the Microsoft Exchange server. See  Microsoft Exchange Server  documentation for details about how to set up the mailbox server. 
2. Create email accounts to be used for rooms reservations. For more details about how to do create room mailboxes, see  Create and manage room mailboxes on the Microsoft Exchange server  in Microsoft documentation. 

3. (Recommended) For each room mailbox, create regular events for non-working hours so that users cannot book a room at the non-working time.

To prepare assets for reservation

1. In the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Admin console, perform one of the following actions:
   

   • Go to Location Management > Assets > View All, and search for an asset by location.

   • Go to Location Management > Floor Maps. Select a floor map, click the Edit Floor Map button, and then select an asset.

2. For each asset that you want to be available for reservation, specify the following details:

• • A valid email address that the system administrator provides so that the asset can be reserved on the Microsoft Exchange server.  
  • Select the applicable Asset Attributes, including the capacity for the room so that users find assets that match their search criteria.
  • For rooms, select the appropriate Custom fields so that users can enter the criteria for searches.
    

For more details about how to edit an asset, see Managing assets on floor maps.

To allow reservation of an asset

1. Navigate to Location Management > Assets > Types library.
2. For each asset type that you want to be available for reservation, enable the following options:
   • Allow reservations
   • Allow checkins
   
3. Click Save.

After you configure rooms for reservation, end users can perform the following actions:

• Search for the assets available for reservations by clicking the Make a reservation button on their Locations page:
  
  
  The following image shows the Reserve dialog box where an end user can search rooms by locations:
  
• Search for the assets available for reservation on their Floor map page:
  
  
  
• View the room asset profile:
  
• Choose the available time slot for reservation:
  
  

When the end user reserves a room, the appropriate post is added to the asset profile, and an email notification is sent to the end user. The event is automatically created in the user's mailbox calendar. To decline the reservation, end users need to decline the event in their mailbox calendar.