I've been asked to remind everyone about how WebEvent process
"user" requests for room reservations.


1) ONLY the designated Webevent schedulers, i.e. those who Jeff
Mangum has assigned a WebEvent administrator login, can actually
MAKE a reservation.  No event/room is actually reserved until
one of the administrators has entered the reservation into the 
WebEvent database.  No "guest" user can actually MAKE a reservation,
that can only be done by an administrator.

One consequence of this ... any reservation request, whether
it's made through the "ADD EVENT" button on an individual calendar
or through the NRAO custom web interface, still has to be approved
by one of the WebEvent administrator group before it becomes an
actual reservation.  


2) There are TWO ways in which staff can send a REQUEST for
a reservation to the administrator group.  Both result in email 
being sent to the whole calendar administrator group, 
calendar@nrao.edu.


A. The "ADD EVENT" button on an individual WebEvent calendar
============================================================

The gold "Add Event" button on an individual calendar allows
a guest user to enter a REQUEST for just the room shown on 
that calendar. When a request is made this way, WebEvent creates 
a template reservation in its own internal format and also notifies 
all WebEvent administrators that there is a pending reservation
request (a) by displaying an icon when any administrator 
logs in and (b) by sending an email from "WebEvent" to everyone
in the calendar@nrao,edu mailing list.  Nothing is actually 
reserved until an administrator approves that reservation 
request, but both the displayed icon and the email notify all
administrators that a request is waiting for approval.

The "ADD EVENT" button is specific to the calendar on which it 
appears, so users cannot request multi-room meeting reservations 
this way. 


B. NRAO custom web interface
============================

I maintain a web page at  

www.nrao.edu/internal/reserve.shtml

that lets anyone enter requests for meeting reservations that
require multiple rooms, together with the inter-site communication 
needs (phone hookups, video, etc) for their meeting.

When a user fills in this form and presses its "Send Request"
button, an email is sent to calendar@nrao.edu containing all
the information they gave to describe their multi-room meeting 
needs,  This email to calendar@nrao.eu also appears to be from 
the "name" that they filled out in the web form, rather than 
from "WebEvent".  

Just as with the "ADD EVENT" button, all they have done at this
point is to REQUEST a reservation ... but in this case it can be
for multiple rooms.  It still needs an administrator to approve the
request, using their Webevent administrator login to create a 
MULTI-CALENDAR reservation in WebEvent.  (At the same time, you
can check whether the necessary phone and video conferencing hubs 
are in fact available for the rooms that were requested.) 


WHICH REQUEST METHOD SHOULD PEOPLE USE?

The main differences between the two ways of making these 
reservation REQUESTS are that the "ADD EVENT" button notifies 
all administrators both by the icon and by an email message 
that a request is awaiting approval (and it pre-formats the 
request as a WebEvent data entry screen).  But it is also 
fundamentally tied to requesting only ONE room at a time.  

The NRAO web interface sits outside of WebEvent itself, so it 
cannot preformat the data entry page or activate the "pending 
request" icon. It just sends the email request to "calendar".

WebEvent has no built-in way to process "ADD EVENT" requests 
for several rooms at once from a guest account ... that's why 
we had to come up with our own way for people to do that. 

If you see that someone's regularly making requests for just 
ONE room, i.e. for purely "local" meetings, then please
encourage them to use the "ADD EVENT" button on that room's 
calendar for this purpose ... that will make it easier for you 
to process the requests and also to see that some unsatisfied 
requests are pending.


WHY NOT MAKE IT ALL FULLY AUTOMATIC?

Several people have asked this recently, and we will look out
for such facilities in any successor to WebEvent but ...

If we wanted everyone at the observatory to be able to 
automatically enter reservations in WebEvent, then we'd have to give 
EVERYONE a WebEvent administrator account and password (and then 
they'd be able to remove other requests, to book room combinations 
that conflict with other priorities or with the actual communications 
capabilities, etc.)  That's an arrangement that would have its own
problems, which I suspect would exceed those we have had with the
current administrator group acting as "gatekeepers" for the room
reservations.