Access versus Outlook

[eacollie]

I need to create a way to visualize room/facility reservations. I'm hoping someone can help in steering me in the best direction. Ultimately, what I want is a calendar-type format with dates across the top and rooms/facilities across the side to be able to see when the rooms/facilities are in use at quick glance.

Is this better done with Access or with Outlook?

I need to have multiple individuals in a network to be able to see and input information.

Thanks!

 

[spikepl]

This function already exists in Outlook. When you attempt to set up a meeting, you can see the participants calendars and availability. A room can be a participant.

 

[eacollie]

Thanks spikepl.

I think I'm lost here. Doesn't the participant have to be an email address?

 

[spikepl]

I guess so - I never wondered about the specifics. I do not think Outlook cares whether it's people or rooms that are set up with accounts on the Exchange server.

 

[stopher]

You can set a room as a Resource (when you schedule the meeting). What happens then is that the "Room" gets a meeting invite and automatically responds whether the meeting can be booked or not. I think you administrators have to set up the Room on Outlook exchange though.

hth
Chris

 

[stopher]

Some more info.

Also remember that you can view multiple users calendars side by side. So equally you can view the availability of multiple rooms side by side.

hth
Chris

 

[eacollie]

OK, thanks. It sounds like this would be better done in Access.

 

[Johnny]

It would be MUCH easier to do in outlook as people have indicated above, doing this in Access brings in a whole new set of problems, a couple which are accessability and workflow.

Just set up rooms as resources in outlook, it will warn people if they try to double book a room, and they only need to pull up that resource to see if its being used (busy) or not.

 

[eacollie]

Thanks Johnny. To set up a room as a resource do I have to set up an email address for it?

 

[Johnny]

Yes, each room would have a email account, when you define the display name here is where you want to be specific so that "room" is identifiable from another room.

You would set up that account to automatically accept calendar invites, auto decline conflicting and reoccuring meeting requests for obvious reasons.

 

[stopher]

See the last option headed "email accounts" that was presented in the link I gave in post 6.
Chris

 

[darbid]

I need to create a way to visualize room/facility reservations. I'm hoping someone can help in steering me in the best direction. Ultimately, what I want is a calendar-type format with dates across the top and rooms/facilities across the side to be able to see when the rooms/facilities are in use at quick glance.

Is this better done with Access or with Outlook?

I need to have multiple individuals in a network to be able to see and input information.

Thanks!

I agree with the other guys. Use Outlook for outlook things and use Access for database things. Here you have a conflict or gray area and are having problems visualising how to do it. I imagine you have a MsAccess database which tracks projects/things/topics - and at some stage during this process the projects/things/topics need to have meetings and thus you want to help users of your database with this as well. So the question is how much of your database handles your meeting in Outlook and how much of Outlook handles the projects/things/topics.

If you have resources set up with an email address, then appointments can be done with this resource.

Making the appointment from Access is not a problem. The problems or difficulties exist when you want to reshow the appointments from access or when changes are needed.

1. Reshowing the appointment. - Imagine you have a form which shows your record ie project/thing/topic and you need to show the appointments that have been made. Access would need to query Outlook for all the appointments which have been made for this project/thing/topic. Here to make things simply what I did was - as Access helps users to make the outlook appointment, I save the main things like people, place, dates and times in access as well. Thus when showing the record I just rely on my Access tables.

2. Changes in Appointments. The problem with 1 above is changes, especially because your users can change the appointment in Outlook without Access. This is the problem I had and I did not fully deal with this problem because my conneciton between Outlook and Access was for an appointment that does not happen very often and is centrally done, thus minimal changes.

I think you are on the right track in the other question you have in the forum - to ID the appointment and to then get access to always check if there is an appointment and the details of the appointment.

 

[smig]

I made a schedule for access
It's not OutLook and will not have all it's options.
Use it if you need somethign to be connected to your db.

Use OutLook if what you need is OutLook

I now work on new version.