User Management

zThis is why it is important for your software products to also reflect the structures your company chooses to employ. YAROOMS does just that through its user management feature.

Imagine you would have only admin users for a room booking software - persons that can book a meeting anytime, cancel other people’s meetings at their convenience and modify rules and settings however they please. Sounds like there’s not much of a point in having a room booking software, you might as well use a piece of paper with a table drawn onto it - chaos will be the order of the day, as paradoxical as that might sound. This is why different user types are necessary for a room booking software - some should be allowed to modify everything and anything, others only bits and pieces and others nothing at all (view-only rights). These are the premises that underlie YAROOMS’s user management system - just as you only have a couple of high-placed employees with wide-ranging authority and others with various degrees of permissions and powers, so you should also have user types with various degrees of permissions.

Here is what the user management feature offers at a glance:

  • Predefined user types
    • Administrator
    • Supervisor
    • Tablet Service Account
  • Custom defined user types
  • Guest user type

Let’s take a look at what each of these entails.

Predefined User Types

Predefined user types, as the name suggests, are fixed user types that cannot be edited or modified. These are essential for the functioning of a room booking system such as YAROOMS, which is why they cannot be removed. Nonetheless, who you choose to assign these roles to is entirely up to you. The predefined user types are threefold: administrator, supervisor, and tablet service account.

Administrator

While the first user created will automatically be an admin, you can later on add as many administrator users as you wish, by assigning them to this group. The admin role is the highest ranking one in YAROOMS’s hierarchy of users, being able not only to book a room anywhere, anytime without permission from anyone else, but also having the capability to create rooms, locations, or resources. Furthermore, an admin can modify any user’s meetings, but also access billing information and any other administrative reports concerning room usage or costs/income information per room.

Supervisor

The supervisor user type is someone that is rather similar to an admin, with the sole exception of not having access to the management section (reports included) or to the billing information section. Supervisors can, however, book a meeting in any room and modify any user’s meetings, if they find this action fitting. This type of user is ideal for those trusted members of your organization that need to be able to book meetings anywhere, while also having the authority to change other users’ meeting times or rooms if the need arises.

Tablet Service Accounts

As the name suggests, these types of accounts exist solely for pairing with the YAROOMS Door Tablet app. Therefore, they only concern the tablet app and cannot be used for the web version of YAROOMS. The scope of this user type is also administrative but only for room signage tablets. It bestows on the person assigned to it the rights to set up a door signage tablet, to pair it with a specific room, while also being able to book/check-in/no-show/extend/end meetings directly from the YAROOMS Door app.

woman having an online call

Custom-Defined User Types

Alongside the predefined user types that come with YAROOMS, each product owner can define as many user types as they wish, depending on their company’s internal needs. Maybe some companies only need one admin, multiple supervisors, but 5 other different types of users with various degrees of permission. Let’s take a look at some examples to better understand how this works.

Let’s say that within your company there are 2 locations (Philadelphia and New York) each with 5 different meeting rooms (A, B, C, D, E). Within this structure, you have no problem allowing employees from location Philadelphia to book meeting rooms A, B, C, and D for their location. However, New York employees should only be able to book meeting rooms A and B for the Philadelphia location, while also requiring approval for their bookings since they are not part of the same location. Furthermore, general New York employees should only be able to book rooms A, B, and C for their location without approval, since meeting rooms D and E are reserved for management board meetings. With all of these special permissions, you will need to be able to create a specific user type for general New York employees that ecompasses all the permissions they are granted. This is why Custom-defined user types are a handy tool to have.

Of course that not all organizations have such complicated room booking structure. Some just have one location with three meeting rooms, one of them, however, being reserved only for top management meetings. As such, this type of organization will only need to create a group for users that can book rooms 1 and 2, but not 3, and one group for those that can book all three rooms. It’s as easy as that.

The only seeming caveat is the fact that you can only assign a user to one user type. So, while you can have multiple user types, one user can only pertain to one such type and not to more. This might seem like a caveat of the system but we have actually decided to put this rule in place to keep everything as simple and neat as possible without overlapping user types that can create confusion and sometimes even conflicting permissions.

Guest User Type

The Guest user type (only one user can be assigned to this type) can be activated by an admin in the Integrations menu → Public access. This is an optional user type that can allow external users to have as many permissions as you would like to grant them when it comes to your company’s YAROOMS calendar. What this means is that people that are not part of your company but that have been invited via email addresses to meetings, will not only receive a notification email for that meeting date and location, but also a link with which they can log into your company’s calendar to see the entire calendar of meetings for that room, location, day, week, month and so on, depending on the permissions granted to the user type that the Guest user has been assigned to. Long story short, the Guest user can be activated upon your will to grant various levels of access to external users.

Special Mention

While external users are not technically users or pertain to user types, it is worth to mention that for any booked meeting, you can also add email addresses of people that are not part of your company, but that will take part in the meeting. These people will receive an email notification with details about the specific meeting they have been invited to.

To wrap up, the user management feature is an essential one for a room booking software that needs to reflect the hierarchical structure of the company that employs it. To meet this need, YAROOMS was created and continues to be updated in such a way that its user types reflect the requirements of the companies that need the help of a room booking software. From admin users that have all-encompassing access, to tablet-specific users or custom-defined user roles, YAROOMS’s user management feature has it all.

Topics: News from YAROOMS

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