Detecting Scheduling Conflicts in Meetings

I’m aiming to use the Meetings module to schedule pieces of equipment to be at certain places at certain times.

As suggested in another thread, I’m going to accomplish this by creating a “User” for each piece of equipment and adding that User to the Meeting’s invitees. This part works acceptably well.

What I’m now trying to figure out is whether or not there is a way that I can easily check whether or not a piece of equipment has been scheduled to 2+ meetings at the same time so that I can prevent double-booking any pieces of equipment. The “Scheduler” display inside the Meeting edit page isn’t suitable as it seems to be limited to only showing 8 hours worth of available/busy blocks and I’m going to be scheduling some equipment to be at meetings that last for multiple days.

Can anyone make any suggestions as to how I can handle this with minimal headaches?

Have a look at the Projects module.

On the left menu, there’s an option to see a Resource Calendar which might be good for your purposes.

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Thats an interesting idea!!! I’m wondering if we could copy the resource calendar for other purposes. I have clients that rent out equipment pieces, and this would be great! I have other clients that use cases to schedule repair/maintenance people. If this functionality could be copied and hooked into from different modules that would super cool! I’ll have to put that on my rainy day project list to look into!

So, after playing with the Project module and the Resource Calendar, one of the things that I’m having an issue with is that my selected Resources aren’t showing as busy within the Resource Calendar based on the Project. Only Project Tasks with an assigned user are showing in the calendar.

Since my events could comprise upwards of 20 pieces of equipment, creating a Project Task for each piece of equipment would be incredibly tedious.

Am I missing something to make this work a bit more fluidly?

@pstevens copying the functionality would be difficult, but maybe simply linking projects to other modules (as relationships) is easy and might solve our problems.

@DemoXin I suspect that your case might be a bit too complex for what currently exists in SuiteCRM and you might be better off with some other project management software, or with doing some custom work in SuiteCRM.

Unfortunately, it’s looking like that’s the case.

I appreciate the guidance on this, even if it hasn’t ultimately worked out. I’m potentially still using SuiteCRM for the other aspects of the business and may eventually tie it into my other scheduling system.