Internet Software Sciences Newsletter #129 – January 2015
Tech-Talk from Internet Software Sciences President Scott Vanderlip
Included with your suite of (7) collaborative Web+Center products is the Reservation+Center. This application allows you to create a graphical catalog of items your staff or customers can reserve. The application was originally designed for a media resource requirement at a college where media equipment was reserved and then delivered to particular classroom based on a instructors requirements. Tracking and reserving hundreds of computer projectors, audio equipment and resources was un-workable with manual spreadsheets handling equipment requests and allocations. If you are manually taking calls or emails to schedule almost anything from a conference room to a vehicle or almost any resource, you need the Reservation+Center!
The original “Media+Center” quickly revolved into the “Reservation+Center” as companies, organizations, and colleges starting using the product for reserving everything from conference rooms, vehicle fleets, lending laptops and wireless cards, and even fields and sporting equipment.
Reservation+Center comes free with every Web+Center installation and is already fully integrated with the Web+Center customer and tech staff databases.
You can access your installed Reservation+Center application by going to the URL of
http://hostname/reservation80/ or http://hostname/reservation70/ depending upon the Web+Center version you are running.
Test our Reservation+Center on-line demo!
New Features for Reservation+Center
The Reservation+Center provides a graphical / image catalog of the items that are available to be reserved. In the past, these catalog thumbnail pictures had to be downloaded directly onto the web server. This step typically required IT staff that have file level access to the web server to install the images. Creating and entering the Reservation+Center items into the system is often done by staff that do not have direct access to server so we have added a web based approach to download the catalog image files. We recommend creating resource images that are exactly 90 x 90 pixels.
This feature is available in our current Version 8.0 download, but if you wish to add this feature to your current 7.X or 8.X Web+Center, we can offer you a zip file that contains the 4 new files that you can plug into your current 7.x or 8.x ReservationCenter directory. This feature adds some new buttons to Reservation+Center to enable image download from the web application. Please contact ISS if interested in adding this feature to your current Web+Center installation without a full upgrade.
Worth the effort!
Plan to take an hour or two to create the images and enter in the information about the various resources you would like to put into your Reservation+Center catalog. A well prepared catalog of items with clear images that are sized consistently will enable years of efficient reserving and well worth the initial effort. If you currently have admins, or staff looking up availability of items in outlook, spreadsheets or other tools and responding to email and telephone request, it is time to migrate those reservation processes to the Reservation+Center. There are more advanced features of the Reservation+Center allowing administrative approval of certainly items and placing items in repair. Staff, users, customers can better plan and request their reservation items like a conference room or vehicle if the availability of the item is listed on-line 24 hours a day.
Another separate Reservation+Center system instance?
We have some organizations who have installed another, unique instance of Web+Center just for the Reservation+Center. Sometimes the group that is reserving rooms or vehicles and equipment is not the domain of IT department and they do not want to use a tech license for the person managing the reservation. You can install as many FREE 2 tech Web+Center installation as you wish and a reservation desk can usually be managed by a single person once it is initially setup and configure by the IT group.
On-line example
To show how Reservation+Center can work for reserving everything from your company or organizational vehicle fleets, or hard to reserve test and construction equipment or conference and work rooms, we created a catalog of 18 items.
We invite you to visit our on-line Reservation+Center demo and then populating your Reservation+Center component to start working for you.
Sincerely,
Scott Vanderlip
President Internet Software Sciences