Scharoom – simpler meeting room booking

Booking a meeting room should be easy. But when several companies and people share the same premises, it quickly gets more complicated than you'd think.

We discovered that in our own office.

We used to rely on Microsoft's built-in room booking. As long as we were the only ones using the meeting rooms, it worked well. But when more external people got access to the office, it became a lot more complicated.

TL;DR

When our existing room booking became too complicated for both internal and external users, we built Scharoom. A simple and cost-effective system for booking meeting rooms, showing today's bookings on info screens and following each room's calendar directly in, for example, Outlook.

See, book and share meeting rooms

When more people needed to use our meeting rooms, resources had to be shared, permissions managed, and it became harder to get a simple overview of which rooms were actually free.

So we built Scharoom (short for "Schedule a room").

Scharoom is a simple booking system for meeting rooms, made for offices, coworking spaces, business centres and property owners who want shared meeting rooms to be easier to manage.

Users can see right away which rooms are available and when they're booked, and can book a free room in seconds.

Each room can also be added as a calendar, for example in Outlook. That makes it quick to check availability without opening Scharoom first.

An overview out in the office too

We didn't just want to solve the booking itself. The information also needs to be available where the meeting rooms are actually used.

So in our own office we have an info screen next to the coffee machine that shows today's bookings – which room is booked, when and by whom.

It gives everyone in the office a quick overview of the day without having to ask around or dig through different calendars.

Built to be simple

There are plenty of advanced room booking systems on the market. But for many businesses they also come with features, administration and costs they don't really need.

With Scharoom we wanted to do the opposite.

A simple system that's quick to get started with, solves the actual problem and costs far less than many of the bigger alternatives.

Because sometimes it really shouldn't be harder than seeing a free room – and booking it.