Table of contents
New to Powell Intranet? Click here for the full product overview.
Introduction
The Flexdesk web part is a Powell web part that can be found on the Flexdesk site template page.
This web part is made to offer booking capabilities. Mainly used for desks, it can be adapted for many scenarios like booking a parking slot or loaning materials.
Flex desk web parts on the “Corporate Services - Book your desk” page
Prerequisites
For this web part to work, you'll have to have four specific lists deployed on your SharePoint site, they are :
- "Flexdesk - Area", which will contain all the areas,
- "Flexdesk - Booking" which will contain all the bookings,
- "Flexdesk - Desk" which will contain all the desks,
- "Flexdesk - Map" which will contain all the maps,
To do so, you can follow the steps below for each one of them, for example, the list "Flexdesk - Area" will be deployed but the steps are all the same for the lists and need to be reproduced for each.
How to deploy a Flexdesk list
For our Flexdesk feature to work, you have to create your Flexdesk lists from your site configuration on Powell Manager.
You will see a step-by-step guide on how to deploy them below.
First of all, you'll have to go to the site where you want to add the Flexdesk feature.
You can do so by selecting "Powell Intranet" in the Powell Manager navigation bar. Then you can select the "Design" section, and click on "Sites" under the "Sharepoint templates" list.
Then you can click on the "edit" button of the desired site, or create a new one.
After this step, you'll be redirected to the following page where you will be able to manage your site lists by selecting "List" in the left navigation.
From the "List" section, available from the left navigation in your site configuration, you have to click on the "Create a new list" button.
From there, a pop-in will open itself on the right side of your page. You don't need to fill in anything, you just have to click the "Select a list model" drop-down.
Under the "Powell Intranet" list models, you have to select the "Flexdesk - Area" list.
Once you select it, you can directly click the "save" button at the bottom of the pop-in.
After saving it, you can check on your site lists, the "Flexdesk - Area" list is now created.
You can now reproduce these steps to have the four required Flexdesk lists.
Once you're finished, you have to synchronize them by clicking the "sync" button, you have now finished all the requirements to add Flexdesk to your intranet.
Settings
Configure the web part on the site.
After selecting the Flexdesk web part, the following edit form will appear. You will see how to configure each section of it below.
Web-part behavior configuration
Here, you can configure a few of your web-part behaviors:
- Display the map
- Display the list of desks
- Let the user change the map
- Display the map title
- Enable mail notifications, and if so, select which email template from the drop-down list - : It is managed in Powell Manager - you can create your template emails in the corresponding entry and they will appear in the list of available templates of the web part
- Set maximum days for a reservation
- Set if bookings are limited for the x days
- Set a s
- Allowing the user to book multiple slots simultanously
Edit an existing map
You can edit your map and:
- add a slot: that will add another desk
- add a meeting room: add another room to the map. you can also choose proposed rooms from the list
- delete an area
- edit an area: you can change the name of an area, color and enable audience targeting:
*enable audience targeting - restrict an area to a specific group of people (based on Sharepoint security groups)
"Map" configuration/ create a new map
Here, you can configure your maps and the organization you want in your web part.
- First, you'll have to create a new map. Each time you'll want to add a new map, you'll have to click on "Create a map" and upload your map. In edit mode, you can create a new map by downloading a file for the background.
We recommend uploading an image in web format (~200ko)
- Once your map background is uploaded, you can add a Title to your map and define the max number of reservations allowed for the entire map. Then, you can start creating your areas and your desks.
- Then you'll have to create a new area :
An area allows you to group your desks in different sections for example reserved to a team (Marketing, R&D, …) or according to the kind of desk offered (meeting room, personal desk, open space, …)
Click on the “Add area” button to insert a new area. Fill in the area name and click on the “Save” button.
- The area will take a random color and all your desks created under this area will take this color on the map. In the future, you will be able to add a user group to an area and make available desks only for people present in this group.
- Then you can create a new desk.
Under your area, you can create a desk by clicking on the “Add desk” button. That will create a new square in the map that you will be able to manipulate (resize, move) and place where you want in your map.
- The last step is to save the configuration.
Once you have created all your areas and desks, you can save your map settings and the configuration of the web part to see the result!
Now your users can book available desks!
Manage Office 365 meeting room with flexdesk
In Flexdesk you can give your users the opportunity to check the availability and book your Office 365 meeting rooms. A booking will create an event in the meeting room and user calendars.
How to configure Office 365 meeting rooms on Flexdesk
Prerequisites:
- Be a contributor (part of Members group for example) on the site where Flexdesk is deployed.
- Check if you consent the Powell Graph API to get the Office Rooms. You can do it directlly from the webpart on the "Graph permissions needed" section.
First, you need to edit your component. Very easy with the Edit button!
Then in your area, choose "Add a meeting room"
A new drop-down list with all the meeting rooms and a square on a map will appear.
You just need to select one and correctly place the square of the room in your plan.
The last thing to do is to save your map settings and it's done, your room is ready to be booked!
Manage your Office 365 meeting rooms appearing in Flexdesk
Prerequisite: Be a tenant administrator
As a tenant administrator, you can manage your meeting room from the Admin center > Resources.
When you add a new resource as the room you need to fill in all the following information.
Important to note: Once you created your meeting room, there may be a delay before it appears on Flexdesk (24h).