Booking and Reservation Calender

Hi there, my name is Johanna and I am working in the Innovation Lab of the Fachhochschule Wiener Neustadt (Austria) - https://innolab.fhwn.ac.at/.

We already have Fabman for a year now, but as we are growing we have difficulties with keeping up the bookings in advanced. For example, we book the equipment for basic trainings for all user, workshops, for which you have to pay for and for lectures or schools/companies, who book special areas in advance.
Booking every single equipment on its on, takes a lot of time. It would be great if we could book by equipment category, or does anyone of you have good workaround for that?

The second problem we are facing it the multiple calendars we have.

  1. Fabman reservations (only users can see) - bookings in fabman
  2. calander on the website for potential users and people who are interested - there you can book your spot for the basic trainings or guided tours (we still haven’t found the right plug-in for our wordpress webseite. let me know if one of you found a good plug-in or workaround)
  3. Calendar for internal use - outlook calendar to track the days off from the staff or meetings, which are internal
  4. Calendar for reservations, because we have a lot of equipment which is not connected to a fabman bridge.

I don’t think we need all four calendars/tools, but this is how it is at the moment. How does you handle the booking of basic trainings or workshops?

The third problem we have is with the roles of members. We have a lot of volunteers, who make the basic training, but only if all of them are admins they could enter the training. It would be very helpful if there were further roles/levels of approval, such as staff or trainers, to whom you can give other approvals. e.g.: staff can reserve equipment for other members or can assign training, but cannot change prices or opening hours.
How does it work at our space? Does anyone have a workaround for that?

Looking forward to your answers,
Johanna

Hey Johanna,

regarding the third problem: that’s an interesting issue. I’m surprised it hadn’t come up before. I’ll keep in mind for future improvements to Fabman.