Meeting room and guest room booking

When the room calendar and access control work separately

The room has been booked for a week, the invitations have gone out, everyone has arrived on time, and they are all standing outside a locked door, because only the maintenance department has a card for that wing and the person who has it is out in the production hall.

With an outside visitor it is simpler: the visitor has no card at all. Someone has to come down to collect them, take them in and see them out after the meeting. With two meetings a day that is a minor thing; with ten, someone spends a good part of the day fetching visitors.

Most sites already have both a room calendar and access control; they just work as two separate systems that know nothing about each other.

Booking a room with door access

In TraxSystem a booking is both a calendar entry and a permission for the door. A participant who is in the access control records gets in with their own card, with no extra card and no separate reader: for the duration of the meeting, their card also works at that room. A visitor who is not in the records, added to the booking by hand, gets a PIN.

The access window covers the booking time plus the margins set for the room, a dozen or so minutes before and after. Without them, whoever arrives first would be waiting at the door until the exact start time.

A booking never takes anything away. It adds access for its duration and then switches off, and a person with a permanent permission for that door keeps it regardless of whether the room is in use at the time.

Zone entrances on the way to the room

A meeting room is rarely next to the main entrance. Usually you have to go along a corridor, take a lift or pass through a door onto the floor, and any of these passages can be locked.

So in TraxSystem, a room is assigned two lists of passages: its own door and the zone entrances on the way. The booking opens both for the same time window, and both permissions switch off with it. If it opened only the door of the room, a participant would reach a locked corridor with their card and once again need someone to let them in.

The list of zone entrances is set separately for each room, so rooms on the same floor repeat the same passages. There is no separate zone definition in the system that someone has to remember after every change to the door layout.

Meeting mode and hotel mode

Meeting rooms and training rooms are booked in meeting mode: to the minute, from one time to another.

Guest bedrooms for visitors, service engineers and drivers are booked in hotel mode. You enter only the arrival and departure dates, and the system takes the times from the room settings: by default, check-in at two in the afternoon and check-out at noon. The number of nights follows from the difference between the dates, so a stay from Monday to Thursday is three nights, even though it lasts seventy hours.

A check-out time earlier than the check-in time looks like a mistake in the settings, but it is intentional: it means that one guest leaving and the next arriving on the same day are two separate stays with no clash between them. Access covers the whole stay in one window, without breaks overnight, because splitting it into separate nights would lock the guest out of the room every day at noon.

Site and car park entry by number plate

A booking in TraxSystem covers vehicle entry as well. The participant gives their registration number, and gates are assigned to the room: the site entrance, the car park entrance and the corresponding exits. The camera reads the number plate, the system checks the booking and raises the barrier.

The time window for the vehicle is separate and wider than for the door: by default an hour before and an hour after, compared with a quarter of an hour for the door. A speaker due to present at noon arrives at eleven, parks and only then goes to the room. A quarter of an hour would leave them waiting at a lowered barrier, and an hour’s margin at the door would let in someone who is only due in that room in the afternoon.

The number plate from the booking does not go into the vehicle records, because this is a one-off visitor entry. After the vehicle leaves, there is no record to clean up and no permission that someone will forget about.

The system checks bookings last of all. It first looks for the vehicle in the vehicle records, then in vehicle groups, and only when nothing has recognised it does it look at bookings. So the module doesn’t intercept anyone’s passage and handles only those that used to end with an “unknown vehicle” message.

A room with no door of its own but with gates assigned is also a valid configuration: a room without an electronic lock in a building you have to drive into.

Visitor PINs and notifications for participants

A visitor from outside the company has no card, so they get a PIN code. The code works only at that room and only during that booking, and once the booking has ended it no longer opens anything.

The system treats an entry as a PIN only when it doesn’t match any card, because a number that is someone’s card has to remain a card. Entering a PIN requires a reader with a keypad.

Each participant gets a separate message, because it contains the PIN, and a PIN is one person’s secret. The email contains full information: directions, photos of the room, a floor plan and a link to the map. The SMS is a summary: what, where, when, the code and a link. If the time or the room changes, participants receive a change notification, and if the booking is cancelled, a cancellation notice.

Tablet by the meeting room

A tablet can hang by the room showing the schedule for that one room: what is happening now and what else is on today. Optionally, the tablet lets you open the door with a PIN entered on the screen.

The tablet page works without logging in, because there is nobody in the corridor to log in. The secret is the page address itself, which can be changed with one button in the room settings. That is why the tablet shows nothing beyond the schedule for that room: no PINs, phone numbers or visitor names. When it refuses to open the door, it shows a general message, because telling “wrong code” apart from “code outside its time” would tip off a stranger that they had hit on the right digits.

Room booking calendar without a door controller

A room with no passages assigned works in TraxSystem as a planner: the calendar, notifications and usage report all work, but the system does not open the door. Most meeting rooms are like this, and it is a fully fledged way of working. So you can start with the calendar alone and add controllers where they are needed.

What room booking does not do

Room booking does not replace the company calendar and does not synchronise with Outlook or Google Calendar. Participants receive an email and an SMS, but the meeting won’t appear in their work calendar by itself.

TraxSystem is not a hotel management system. It handles the stay and access (room, car park, gate), but it doesn’t sell accommodation: it has no room rates, billing, invoices, booking channels or booking engine on the property’s website. More about use in hotels and guesthouses.

A PIN does not open the gate. The code works at the door of the room, while vehicle entry is handled by the number plate and the assigned gates. If the room has no gates assigned, getting onto the site is dealt with separately, through access control or visitor registration.

The system won’t guess a registration number: if no number plate is given, the vehicle enters under the existing arrangements and the booking doesn’t move the barrier. Nor will it open the barrier at a gate that has no number plate recognition camera.

A booking doesn’t take away permissions that someone already has. It doesn’t manage catering or equipment, because the room’s equipment is a description and can’t be booked separately. Nor does it monitor attendance: it doesn’t check whether a booked room was used or who was in it, and it shows reads at passages in the same way as for any other door.

Questions about room booking

Related

Access controlNumber plate recognitionHotel and guesthouseReportsDevicesFull list of features

Further reading: A room booking that opens the door · Guest rooms on the company site · A guesthouse without a staffed reception

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