[CAL-3173] resource booking / checking multiple calendars

[mokkin]

Our available places in our current booking system are

1. phone
2. online
3. office 1
4. office 2

If a customer selects phone or online just the availability of the employee has to be checked, but if one of the offices is selected and the customer wants a meeting in person, a resource needs to be checked as well. In our current system both - employees and rooms - are separate CalDav calendars in our Nextcloud. In case a personal meeting is selected, the conference room is checked and booked too.

In my opinion this is a very important feature and essential for cal.com too. The same applies for other resources than rooms such as projectors, cars or medical equipment.

_CAL-3173

[keithwillcode]

@ciaranha for approval

[ciaranha]

This is a great request and something we're likely to do at some stage. I'm not sure it will fall on the very near term roadmap though as there's likely a decent amount of complexity to it and I've never seen this request before.

I would love to hear if any other customers have requested this as that could well change the priority. @milospuac or @shirazdole has this ever come up on your side before?

[ciaranha]

In case a personal meeting is selected, the conference room is checked and booked too.

I wonder could this be resolved by using a team event type for "Phone or online" and then another for "In person" with a round robin with a "Fixed host" on the employee and "Round robin" on the conference rooms... 🤔 The conference rooms would need to be added as team members which is a bit hacky.

[mokkin]

I'm happy that you like the feature request :smile: But I'm also surprised that nobody had this or a similar request before? This feature is quite common and other appointment booking systems like Calendly or eTermin do offer that.

[ciaranha]

I'm happy that you like the feature request 😄 But I'm also surprised that nobody had this or a similar request before? This feature is quite common and other appointment booking systems like Calendly or eTermin do offer that.

Interesting, it looks like Calendly also adds the conference room as a user as I suggested above.

1. Invite the Conference room as a user to your team (create the account and name it "Conference room 1")
2. Connect the relevant calendar
3. Create an event type and put the employee(s) as "Fixed host"
4. Put the Conference room 1, 2, etc. users as round-robin guests
5. The event type will then check the availability of the employee and only show availability when there is at least one conference room also available.

I'm sure there are things we can do to smooth out the experience here but I think this covers the need @mokkin? Create accounts per room doesn't feel ideal but is actually what Calendly do right now.