Bishop Appointment blocked because room is required

I am the Exec Sec. for my ward. I am trying to get my Bishops calendar set up. It is set up but the issue is with scheduling. The Bishop is at the church on Wed. nights for mutual and uses that time for some interviews. I try and schedule the interview for him but the calendar requires I selected a room. The Bishop's office is not on the list and the build is reserved to a ward for mutual so I cannot just pick any room. Because of this I am unable to schedule a meeting for the Bishop in his office when someone else has the building scheduled. This should not block me as they can't and don't have his office reserved.

zodd wrote:I am the Exec Sec. for my ward. I am trying to get my Bishops calendar set up. It is set up but the issue is with scheduling. The Bishop is at the church on Wed. nights for mutual and uses that time for some interviews. I try and schedule the interview for him but the calendar requires I selected a room. The Bishop's office is not on the list and the build is reserved to a ward for mutual so I cannot just pick any room. Because of this I am unable to schedule a meeting for the Bishop in his office when someone else has the building scheduled. This should not block me as they can't and don't have his office reserved.

You should be able to enter an event by using either the No Location or the Other Location options. You should not be required to enter a room when either of these location options is selected.

Indeed that works. Should have tried that. Still seems like the other way should not block me but this at least lets me start scheduling. Thanks!

Odd. In my testing, the location defaults to "No Location" and doesn't require me to change it.

Someone with Administrative access to the buildings (locations) is capable of creating additional rooms for a location. I've already done this as the Stake Technology Specialist, by creating a few additional rooms that were not listed. I suggest that your stake STS modify the rooms in your location by adding your bishop's office or clerk's office to the list.

This would at least allow you to schedule those rooms if a location is desired and not leave the location blank.

techgy wrote:Someone with Administrative access to the buildings (locations) is capable of creating additional rooms for a location. I've already done this as the Stake Technology Specialist, by creating a few additional rooms that were not listed. I suggest that your stake STS modify the rooms in your location by adding your bishop's office or clerk's office to the list.

Once the Bishops office is added to the room list the "Building Scheduler" will still need to go in to the restriction and remove that bishops office from the block which is in place for the entire building.

Someone needs to make it clear to calendar administrators that the ability to reserve the entire building should be used only rarely. We had someone from the stake reserve the whole building for a Ward Conference and, because it was done that way, I couldn't have the Bishopric from another ward hold their Bishopric Meeting in their own office. (Well, it looked like they couldn't hold their meeting there but they did it anyway.)

I agree. Even blocking out the entire building for a single ward on one night of the week is not an efferent use of the building. If a block is needed block out specific rooms which are to be used and leave the rest of the areas open for others to use.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the idea of adding a Bishop's office to the list of locations. It's far too easy to end up locking the Bishop out of his own office because there's no way to restrict other users from scheduling their events there.

It would make sense to add the office if there's a risk of another conflicting event going on at the same time. Especially if the conflict comes from a different calendar.

But if adding the office increases the risk of problems, then I don't think it makes sense to do it.

russellhltn wrote:Personally, I'm not a fan of the idea of adding a Bishop's office to the list of locations.

I'm a big fan we added the Bishops offices and then schedule all the meetings to the calendar that are held in his office through out the year. This way when someone needs to see when and where ward council is they see its in the Bishops office.

russellhltn wrote:It's far too easy to end up locking the Bishop out of his own office because there's no way to restrict other users from scheduling their events there.

Other users could schedule the office if the wanted to, getting into the office maybe a little difficult without a key.

Gary_Miller wrote:This way when someone needs to see when and where ward council is they see its in the Bishops office.

1) Where else would it be? I don't see that information as being very helpful except for someone new to the calling.
2) How does the text in "Other Location" and/or description not suffice?
The benefits seem limited.

While they may not be able to carry out their schedule, having others think they can schedule the Bishop's office is bad enough, not to mention messing things up when they do. It also becomes subject to "entire building" problems.

One thing I did do was to create the stake High Council room as a separate building. That way it can be scheduled for all the various meetings that do take place there (not all of them involving the High Council), and it's not subject to "entire building" problems.

russellhltn wrote:1) Where else would it be?

You would think this would not be a problem, but at one time I lived in a ward where the ward council met in the Relief Society room because the bishop's office was too small for everyone. Even the PEC barely fit. We usually moved that meeting to another classroom, as well.

Actually, my point is that those meetings are typically in the same place every time. For most wards, it would be like asking which room the Sacrament meeting will be held in.

If the room keeps changing depending on the number of people at that particular meeting (Ward Council, Ward Correlation, PEC, etc.), then I can see it being useful. But even if it is needed, it can be done without creating a location for it.

There is a reason we did not include these type of resources in the default list of resources within a building. The system was designed to allow member who are calendar editors (generally group presidency, etc) to schedule events in a facility without having to call the building schedule.

Remember that the application must work for 1000's of people throughout the world and what works for one unit may not work for many other units of the church. For this reason, we have tried to designed flexibility into the system. Just because a feature is present does not mean it is intended for use in every situation.

Rooms that are dedicated to a specific purpose (meaning an room that only a specific group or individual has access to, or in other words its locked, i.e. Bishops office, Stake Presidencies offices, etc) should rarely be add as a resource within a building as the general membership of the unit does not have open access to the space. The one exception is possibility the High Council room, but that all depends on the Stake President's view on its use.

As for scheduling the Bishop's schedule, you can always use the "Other location" option and type "Bishop's Office" in the text field it that is really important to you.

If people are scheduling the entire facility and should not be, then there may needs to be some training to help them understand how facilities to be scheduled (Entire facility vs. specific resources, etc). Just seeing comments on this thread about having the entire facility scheduled improperly should be enough to scare anyone from including private offices in the available resources that can be scheduled. If improper scheduling is occurring what make us think that we will not have members improperly scheduling private spaces like the Bishop's office.