Tip #110 - How to Check Resources' Availibility Before 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 do so, but first you will need to add the resource as a “contact” (if that has not already been done) and include that contact as an attendee when reserving the subject conference room, for example.
First, let’s add the contact.

Click “Contacts” on the Top Toolbar and select “Add Contact” from the resulting 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).

Next, you will need to make the contact an available choice as one of the attendees when creating an appointment. To do so, you will need to add the contact created in Ssteps 1 and 2 above as a “User” in SmartAdvocate. [You more than likely will need to have Administrator privileges to complete the next steps].

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, however, must be checked (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: