Assigning resources when a building is shared

Our stake has 3 wards in each building. Since activity nights are only on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, two wards share the building one night each week.

The online help says simply to create two assignments for this situation, one for each ward, but the calendar does not let you do that. Is there any way to use the resource assignment function for this situation so that only those two wards can schedule resources at that time? This doesn't seem like an uncommon situation.

craiggsmith wrote:Our stake has 3 wards in each building. Since activity nights are only on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, two wards share the building one night each week.

The online help says simply to create two assignments for this situation, one for each ward, but the calendar does not let you do that. Is there any way to use the resource assignment function for this situation so that only those two wards can schedule resources at that time? This doesn't seem like an uncommon situation.

I don't think the help system says that, although the wording could be clearer. It says "If you need to assign the same location to multiple units, you must repeat the steps in this task for each assignment." It doesn't say, "if you need to assign the same location for the same time slot to multiple units..." but I think that's what you read it as saying.

In our stake, we have buildings that are shared by multiple wards, and there are two wards that share Wednesday night in two of the buildings. But there are no conflicts, and we don't ever have a case where two wards would have priority scheduling.

To avoid that problem, we give Ward A the cultural hall on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays, and Ward B gets it on 2nd and 4th Wednesdays. We allocate other rooms as well, following this same pattern. So Ward A knows that it needs to plan activities that require the cultural hall only on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays, and plans activities that can be done in the multi-purpose room on other days. It works quite well, and the new calendar system handles these assignments perfectly.

I think the idea is to have one resource calendar for the building (or at least one calendar for each room that can be independently scheduled). Then assign the appropriate representatives to have edit rights. It will require self-policing to make sure everyone stays within their boundaries.

RussellHltn wrote:I think the idea is to have one resource calendar for the building (or at least one calendar for each room that can be independently scheduled). Then assign the appropriate representatives to have edit rights. It will require self-policing to make sure everyone stays within their boundaries.

With the new calendar you don't have to rely simply on self-policing, and there's really no concept of a separate resource calendar. There's actually a feature for reserving blocks of time for a particular ward for specific resources, which is designed specifically for buildings shared by multiple wards. See Reserving Locations and Resources for details.

aebrown wrote:I don't think the help system says that, although the wording could be clearer. It says "If you need to assign the same location to multiple units, you must repeat the steps in this task for each assignment." It doesn't say, "if you need to assign the same location for the same time slot to multiple units..." but I think that's what you read it as saying.

Yes, that's how I interpreted it. The larger context is "You can only select one unit at a time. If you need to assign the same location to multiple units ..." To me that strongly implies the way I interpreted it. It goes without saying that you would have to create a separate assignment for a different time slot.

aebrown wrote:In our stake, we have buildings that are shared by multiple wards, and there are two wards that share Wednesday night in two of the buildings. But there are no conflicts, and we don't ever have a case where two wards would have priority scheduling.

To avoid that problem, we give Ward A the cultural hall on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays, and Ward B gets it on 2nd and 4th Wednesdays. We allocate other rooms as well, following this same pattern. So Ward A knows that it needs to plan activities that require the cultural hall only on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays, and plans activities that can be done in the multi-purpose room on other days. It works quite well, and the new calendar system handles these assignments perfectly.

Thanks. I thought about that, but I'm not sure if that's how we do it; I'm checking. I hope so. But it still seems that being able to assign a time slot to multiple units would be useful.

Thanks again.