Over the years we have received requests for a feature to be able to combine two or more rooms/sections together into a single room/resource. Maybe you have a sliding door so you can make two rooms into an aula when you want to have a town hall for the company or have education sessions for larger audiences while still being able to use the smaller rooms individually when the big room is not in use.
The important logic to solve is to make sure no one could book the smaller rooms while the bigger room is booked and vice versa. We recently talked with a large company in the staffing sphere who had looked at all our competitors for this feature - without any luck. After researching the market we noticed that there really is no one that has this feature.
”So they challenged us to do it and if we solved it we would get the deal”.
- Tomas Nielsen, Chief Technology Officer @ Humly
Having presented a solution to the customer that solves the room within room on all major calendar systems including Exchange, M365 and Google they enthusiastically agreed to proceed.
Selling the proposal to the development team was a little harder. There is a lot going on in our software and doing changes in the core functionality, on all platforms, should make any developer with experience at least a little vary.
After a few workshops and iterations, the solution came to life in release 1.7. It is actually pretty hard to do and I can understand why our competitors don’t have it - We really have a fantastic development team!
After excellent feedback from one of our customers, we also made an improvement for the next release to copy meeting links to the smaller rooms to support Microsoft Teams Rooms devices so they automatically can pick up the meetings.
You can read more about Room within room in our support documentation.
https://support.humly.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408037779473-Room-w-i-Room
/ Tomas Nielsen, CTO Humly