Tip #153 - How To Check Resources’ AvailabilityBefore Scheduling Appointments

Quite often, you will need to check whether certain resources (such as conference rooms) are available prior to scheduling an appointment. You can use the SmartAdvocate Office Calendar to accomplish this, but first you will need to do two things: Add the resource as a “contact” (if that has not already been done) and then, when reserving the subject conference room, include that contact as an attendee.

First, let’s add the contact.

1. Click “Contacts” on the Top Toolbar and select “Add Contact” from the drop down

2. Create the new contact for the Conference Room or other resources as appropriate. You will need to create the contact as an “Individual” because the contact will be added as a “User” later (see example below)

3. Click “Admin” on the Top Tool bar

4. Select “Users” from the resulting drop-down menu

5. Click the “New User” button in the top left corner of the screen

6. Create a New User by choosing the contact created in steps 1 and 2. In our example, the contact is “Conference Room A”. It is important that you do NOT make the user “Active”, i.e., the Active Box on the next page should be UNCHECKED. If this “User” is made Active, it will use one of your available licenses. The “Visible” box must be checked however (see example below)

7. Click the “Update” button to save the new user

Going forward, when scheduling an appointment that requires the reservation of “Conference Room A” in our example, you would simply choose “Conference Room A” as one of the attendees. Prior to scheduling an appointment, you could then check if Conference Room A is already booked (i.e., already has an “Appointment”) for the date and time you need. You would check this on the Office Calendar.

Conference Room A entered as an ‘attendee’

Conference Room A shown as Reserved (i.e., one of the ‘attendees’) for the date selected