Booking a computer in a training room

  • 2 March 2017
  • 5 replies
  • 41 views

Badge +7

Good day,

 

THE STORY

We have a consulting firm that is busy with a staffing optimisation project and the consultant phoned me to ask if I can add a Spreadsheet somewhere on the intranet so that the HR guys can book people for the training.  So I asked the consultant a few questions about the booking, i.e. Where will it be held? How many computers per training room? How many training rooms? How many sessions does one person attend? What is the main purpose?  After discussing this for a bit with him I told him that we can probably do something better with some SharePoint lists and a bit of workflowhappy.png

 

THE DETAIL

The training will happen at one of our training centres at 2 of the training rooms. They are Training room 3 and 4 and there are 16 computers per training room.  There are also 2 sessions for each day with the possibility of adding a third session.   They want HR to be able to book the people for these sessions per computer but they should also not be able to delete each other's bookings.   They want to see this in a calendar view and he wanted the solution later the afternoon...(+- 3 hours later)

 

THE IMPLEMENTATION

At this point I had a quick discussion with  my colleague Leon Haasbroek‌ and we discussed a few possible solutions.  Seeing that I didn't have a lot of time I decided on a quick and dirty solution because of the time limit.

 

SharePoint

I created a new calendar list and a custom list for all the dates.  I created the Possible booking days (custom list) with three columns with the data (data was built in Excel and uploaded via the Datasheet view)

  • Computer identifier
  • Status
  • Date

 

 

200226_Custom List.PNG

 

In the calendar list I added columns with Company relevant information, i.e. Employee name and Surname (Single line text because not all the guys have got email), Company/Personnel number, Position (Job title), Shaft (Business Unit that h/she works at) and then I pulled in the lookup fields for booking the date and computer.   I also configured the SharePoint Calendar list so that a user can only edit or delete the entries created by him or her. This will solve the issue of guys removing or bookings not made by them.  I changed the form with Nintex Forms

 

 

200227_CalendarForm.PNG

 

The Date selection filters the Possible Bookings Date list on the date field and the Training room field uses a view that already filters the list on status Open only.  So when I get to the Training Room selection I only see available computers for the date. The quick and dirty that I mentioned is that I combined a few fields into one field happy.png   In the form I also save the ID of the selected date in the ID connected to field.

 

200228_Training Computers.PNG

 

You can see in this list I combined the Training Room - Computer nr - and Session all in one field. If I had more time I would split this and not have a list of 1280 instance but as mentioned it was quick to create the records in Excel.

 

The workflow on the Calendar list does 3 things:

  • First step is to go and book out the date in the possible dates list by changing the status to booked.
  • Secondly it creates the booking in the calendar list
  • Thirdly, if the Send email tick was ticked will get the employee's email and other details from SAP and send an email to the employee, manager and CC the HR person that made the booking.

 

200229_Workflow1.PNG

In the Possible Dates booking step I just use and Update Action.

 

In the Create booking step I had to determine the session from the last digit because it was a combined field and then according to the session calculate the start and end times.  This was unfortunately hard coded in the workflow.  The ideal would be to have this in a list so that it is easy to add sessions.  I then updated the booking accordingly.

 

 

 

200230_DetermineSessionPNG.PNG

 

 

 

In the send email action I test if the send email tick was selected. then I get all the information from our SAP system that I need about the employee and about the manager and then I send the email.

 

 

 

200255_SendEmail.PNG

 

So that was my solution.  I know...I took many shortcutshappy.png...please let me know how you would have done this differently.

 

Thanks for your time.


5 replies

Badge +5

Hey Francios! In your tags, could you specify the Nintex versions your solution works with? 

Badge +7

Good day Bingham,

I have updated the tags as requested.  I don't think that this will make a big difference though as the actions I used are the standards actions that has been around for awhile.

I used Nintex Workflow Enterprise 2010 v2.5.1.0.  I think that calling a web service is the only action that is available in enterprise version of the license and the rest is all part of the standard license.

Let me know if you need more information.

Kind regards

Userlevel 4
Badge +11

Hi Francois, also Call Web Service is included in the Standard License, so everything should work also if someone hasn't the Enterprise version of Nintex

Giacomo

Badge +7

Thanks for the confirmation Giacomo.

Badge +5

Thanks Francois! Your blog is great, and I have begun to share it with some of our other customers, but you have no idea how often I get asked about the version it was created on, because the look and feel between the platforms looks just different enough. 

Thank you again! I really appreciate it! 

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