It helps people to find rooms, even when MS Outlook says they’re booked
most calendars will only tell you what's reserved or not...
...yet, rooms are always in one of four states, not just two
Booked but not occupied
Booked and occupied
Not booked and not occupied
Not booked but occupied
Where’s Free? shows occupancy and reservation status as a single view.
BETTER VISIBILITY helpS PEOPLE USE the AVAILABLE SPACE in THEIR BUILDING MORE EFFICIENTLY
Auto- cancel and auto-curtail are also supported, releasing ’no show’ and/or ‘finished-early’ reservations without the organiser having to do anything. Combined with better visibility for the building’s occupants, these features help overcome meeting room and work space capacity shortages.
Clients wanted an all-encompassing solution that would allow them to check and juggle the availability of attendees and rooms simultaneously, something that would take the heavy lifting out of scheduling appointments. ‘When’s Good?’ solves the problem.
Its deep integration to the contacts, appointments and room information on MS Exchange enables ‘When’s Good?’ to work out the optimum times to meet after factoring in your criteria. It then offers a ranked choice of the best possible appointments i.e. those that invitees are most likely to accept.
Having found an available room and time slot using Where’s Free for MS Outlook, you can also check your invitees’ availability with a single click. ‘Who’s Free?’ will respond telling you who is available, not available or partly available at the time you have selected.
It improves the usability of MS Outlook, especially on a mobile.
Where’s Free is more than a simple room-finding and room-booking tool. It offers a number of extensions to MS Outlook and MS Exchange. Our design principle is that anything handled well in MS Outlook is left to MS Outlook, whereas anything that can be meaningfully improved is.
The result is a pairing of applications that complement each other – MS Office and Where’s Free work hand in hand to deliver a user experience that is genuinely helpful.
We could never see the point of fixing an expensive digital touchpad to a meeting room wall when everybody nowadays carries their own touchpad around with them (they’re called ‘smartphones’!)
Apart from the obvious advantage of being mobile and portable, smartphones offer richer and more varied functionality plus people usually already own or have been issued with one. iPhone and Android smartphone usage is therefore the basis of, and fundamental to, our design. A simple, clean and intuitive UX on a smartphone has been one of our principal design objectives from the outset.
The rise of ‘office hotelling’, the shared office and model poses special challenges – also opportunities – for meeting room booking systems including Microsoft Outlook/Exchange. Members of guest organisations demand the easiest and most intuitive way to reserve a space or room at the host’s facility, without being forced to call a receptionist.
At the same time, the hosts need to restrict visibility of their guest organisations’ contacts to their fellow guest colleagues. Leveraging the capabilities of organisations’ existing MS Exchange implementation, Where’s Free for MS Outlook meets this challenge, providing guests and hosts with a seamless user experience.
Shared office guests book available
rooms at the host’s facility using Where’s Free as the interface.The shared office provider controls access to the guests’ contact data within MS Exchange Server.
It informs office space configuration decisions
WHAT INFORMATION IS CAPTURED, ANALYSED AND REPORTED?
There are real money savings to be made by optimally
configuring your office footprint. However, succeeding depends on having the right information presented in a way that is readily usable.
Analytics, Data Mining, Big Data – there’s no shortage of offerings – seem to assume that every user has a PHD in data analysis!
HOW EASY IS TO
PRODUCE REPORTS?
Sticking to our ‘keep it simple’ philosophy, we capture the key data that users actually ask for – data that is
straightforward and informative. We make the information
available in simple tabular form that users can then filter and sort.
Alternatively, users can export to MS Excel where they can
create charts and graphs or perform calculations exactly as they wish.
Meeting Rooms
35%
Office Space
25%
Open Plan
45%
Where’s Free now combines with a Real Time Location System (RTLS). The RTLS has the advantage of being able to advise how many people are within particular spaces. As a result, we are now able to report both in real time and historically (via a smartphone, tablet or pc) whether it is likely that social distancing guidelines are being contravened within a room or space.
If the company is facing the loss, or partial loss, of their income (e.g. through redundancy) a common strategy is to rent out a spare room to help pay the bills. We are able to support an ‘Office Airbnb model’ for organisations seeking additional revenue by renting out unused desks, offices or meeting rooms to third parties.
Where’s Free is able to support the online ‘masking off’ of spaces to prevent people from booking them e.g. by making only every other hot desk in a row bookable because an organisation wants to ensure social distancing and if the area you are sitting in is overcrowded or gets too busy then click on the Where’s Free icon and it will show you any empty and/or unreserved rooms or desks that you can transfer to, improving your social distance.
Monitor social distancing compliance in real-time as well as historically.
Supplement your revenue by letting out your unused space whilst still ensuring the safety and security of your building’s occupants.
Ensure your staff maintain social distancing by preventing the reservation of selected spaces.
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