Archibus SaaS / Reservations / Reserve
Workplace Services / Reservations / Reserve Rooms and Resources

Capacity when Reserving Meeting Spaces (Concept)

For some deployments, it is important to know how many attendees are expected to be physically present for a meeting, rather than knowing the number of invitees, some of whom might attend the meeting remotely. For example, setup personnel might need to know the number of people they are preparing the room for. Also, the Room Capacity Utilization per Month report uses the # of Attendees in Room field to calculate Capacity Use. For these reasons, you can track the number of attendees that you expect to be physically present.

When creating a reservation, when you enter the Capacity in the Filter Console:

• the value you enter is used to find rooms with room arrangements that can accommodate the Capacity you enter.
• the value for the Capacity field is also saved to the database as the # of Attendees in Room field (reserve_rm.attendees_in_room).
• If needed, you can update the # of Attendees in Room value to more accurately reflect those who will be physically present, rather than the number of attendees. The # of Attendees in Room field is available when editing a reservation from the Edit pop-up window that appears when you double-click the reservation in the timeline. Editing this value from the timeline is the quickest way to update this value.
• If you save a value for the # of Attendees in Room, this value is now shown as the Capacity in the Filter console.
• When editing a room, if you change the value in the Capacity field in the Filter and click Apply Filter, the # of Attendees in Room field is updated with this value. For example, if you enter 5 as the Capacity in the filter, select two rooms, then modify the # of Attendees in Room value for one of the rooms to four, and change the other to one, then enter a new Capacity of six and click Apply Filter, the values are modified to six again. If you go to confirm the reservation, both reservations will have six as the value saved for both rooms. For this reason, it is best to update the # of Attendees in Room value from the timeline after you no longer need to use the Capacity field in the Filter. If you need to change the value for the # of Attendees in Room, the easiest way to do so is by clicking on the room in the timeline, and making the change in the pop-up window.

For information on the Capacity field when working with recurring conference calls, see Editing Conference calls and the Capacity field

Note: Entering the Capacity field might be required, depending on how your business process owner set the application parameter PluginCapacityRequired . If required, you must enter a Capacity in the Filter before confirming the reservation.

Note: Legacy data. When creating a new reservation from the Reservations application, by default, the Capacity field in the Filter and the # of Attendees in the Room field are set to 5. Reservations created before the # of Attendees in Room field was added to the application will have 0 attendees in the room specified, so the Capacity field in the Filter will also be set to 0. It is necessary to update this number only if tracking the # of Attendees in Room is important to your workflow.

How the value for the Capacity field affects the Room Capacity Utilization report

For reporting, each room reservation in a conference call is treated as a separate reservation. Since attendees are not assigned to a specific room, all attendees will be added to each reservation in the conference call when calculating capacity utilization for reporting. Be aware that this will artificially increase the average capacity use for the Reservations / Reports / Room Capacity Utilization report. The Room Capacity Utilization per Month report uses the # of Attendees in Room value to calculate the Average Capacity Use per month. See Reservations Reports.

To get a more accurate total for conference calls in reports, you can edit the value for the # of Attendees in Room field for each room directly from the timeline by clicking on the room's reservation, and changing the value in the Edit Room Reservation pop-up window. However, be aware that whenever you make an entry in the Capacity field and click Apply Filter, the system overwrites the # of Attendees in Room field with the capacity entered. For this reason, you should make changes to the # of Attendees in Room field when you no longer need to use the Capacity field to locate specific rooms. This way the system will not overwrite the changes you make.

If you do need to make subsequent room selections using the Capacity field as a filter criteria, making changes from the timeline pop-up window is the easiest way to update the # of Attendees in Room field to more accurately reflect attendance.

Capacity and Other Archibus Applications

• If you are integrating Maintenance with Reservations, the # of Attendees in Room field is shown in the work request's Description so that setup personnel know how many people they are preparing the room for.