Monthly Archives: October 2016

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a good solution to manage meeting rooms or venues. This article explains how to create rooms and how to make reservations.

Creating venues and meeting rooms

Facilities/equipment is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM entity designed to create meeting rooms and venues. Go to settings->Business Management->Facilities/Equipment to create the meeting rooms. Each meeting room can be associated to a Business unit, to a Site and to a Time Zone. All those settings are very important if you have to manage different meeting rooms in different locations.

Booking rooms

Booking a Meeting rooms in Microsoft Dynamics CRM means adding the rooms to an Appointment or to Service Activities as a required or an optional resource. In the service calendar, you will then see all the bookings associated to the meeting rooms.

Service calendar and display options

Unfortunately, the standard service calendar does not allow to save a default view. Also, you cannot choose a default site or how many days you want to display by default. You have to edit each appointment to move bookings and to assign a booking to a different room as the drag and drop is not implemented in the calendar. When you look at different meeting rooms in different locations with different time zone, the standard service calendar shows all the bookings in the time zone of the current user. A room booked in New York from 8AM to 12AM appears as booked from 3AM to 7AM to a user logged in London.

Advanced calendar options

Apex Planner overcomes those issues by providing an advanced calendar expressly designed to enhance the Dynamics CRM calendar. Apex Planner features a user-based configuration with 30+ default settings to create the most efficient view of the calendar. Apex Planner allows drag and drop to reschedule, reassign and clone bookings. Apex Planner can also show Meeting Rooms Bookings in the room’s own time zone. On the other hand, Apex Planner preserves all the standard features of the Dynamics CRM calendar and it is also aware of custom entities, custom statuses and plug-ins you may have in your CRM implementation. Learn more about Apex Planner at http://www.apex.it/en/crm/apex-planner

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