1. Conference Room Activities in IT-UDS

2. Conference Room related activities
Within the IT-UDS group there are several related activities which concern conference rooms:
The AV section provides technical support and filming in the main building rooms
CDSAgenda has been developed
initiated by a request from ATLAS to help manage their collaboration meetings
CRBS – Conference Room Booking System has been developed to automate and facilitate booking rooms for meetings.
The group has been a partner in the InDiCo project funded by EU.
Will become the new CDS Agenda later this year.

3. Conference Room Booking System (CRBS)
Started in 1997 to manage main conference rooms
5 or 6 rooms
Now about 60% of all conference rooms (74) managed by CRBS.
26,700 reservations in 2003
1,773 distinct users
Supports “private” rooms not available for general booking.

4. Conference Room Booking System (CRBS)
Uses an Oracle database with a web interface
Uses the concept of pre-booking
Users send requests to the room “owners”
“owners” accepts or reject requests
Prevents anarchy !
Available from outside of CERN
Guest access with password
Added some primitive support for video conference rooms
These rooms are tagged as having special equipment
Generates pop-up warnings when these rooms are reserved.
No direct link between booking the physical room and the virtual one

5. CRBS Pop-ups

6. CRBS Pop-ups

7. Using CRBS with video conferences
It would be relatively easy to link CRBS at CERN with other compatible reservation systems.
Other systems need to send a well formed request to CRBS via http
e.g. check if any suitable room at CERN is free on a certain date & time
CRBS will return a list of rooms
Select a room and send a pre-booking request back via http
All the above can be done automatically
The actual reservation still needs a “human touch”
Confirmation send by

8. Using CRBS with video conferences
It is conceivable to make an exception for video conferencing rooms. In this case:
The rooms would be bookable directly, with no need for a confirmation.
Would need some kind of verification; could be done on a machine basis or user id
Rooms could be booked automatically from outside of CERN
Managing conflicting bookings might be a pain !
Need the agreement of the “owners”
In any case, we are happy to work with you to make CRBS better integrate with Video-conferencing.