Live meeting room availability

In a workplace environment, being able to see in real-time the availability of meeting rooms across the building with a simple glance at the map is a must!

There are multiple ways you can do that with Mapwize.

Connect places to Office 365 agendas

Places in Mapwize can be linked to Office 365 agendas. Based on the bookings on the agenda, the place will turn:

• red if there is a meeting going on
• orange if there is a meeting starting in less than 15 minutes
• green if the room is free and can be used

The connection between the Office 365 agenda and the place is done once using Mapwize built-in feature. Then the room agenda is synced within less than a minute delay.

Your IT administrator should ideally create a service account with access to the calendars that need to be linked to Mapwize. Also, it should grant the "Mapwize" application (Application ID 06659e9d-8c73-4304-a88b-599c24319862) with the following permissions offline_access and calendars.read.shared in Active Directory.

Then you can link your Office 365 account with your Mapwize Organization and link each place with the corresponding calendar using the Mapwize API.

Change room status on the client-side

If you are integrating Mapwize in your own app and you have the possibility to retrieve room status by yourself, the best is to inject the occupancy directly in the SDK on the client side. In this solution, the map data comes from Mapwize, the occupancy from you, and both are merged at display time. The occupancy data are actually never reaching Mapwize's servers.

All Mapwize SDKs (iOS, Android, and Web) have methods to override place style. Using those methods, you can decide how to color each room based on your rules and data.

Such a solution also allows to not only showroom availability now, but also at any time in the past or future by letting the user select a time and load the occupancy data accordingly. The counterpart is that it requires a bit more development from your side.

Change room status on the server-side

If you are using the Mapwize apps or if you don't want to do much coding, another option is to change room style on Mapwize's servers using our API. On a regular basis, or when the status of a room changes, you can send a request to update the place object. Changes done on our servers are replicated to all apps viewing the map within a maximum of 30 seconds.

Updates to the places can be done using our REST API, and in particular the PUT /v1/places/{{place_id}}. The documentation can be found on https://docs.mapwize.io/

Using presence sensors in rooms

Presence sensors can be deployed in a meeting room to know their real occupancy in real-time. This data can be visualized on the map, or even combined with calendar data to create cases like

• booked and busy
• booked but unoccupied
• occupied but not booked
• free

At the moment, Mapwize does not have built-in support for presence sensors. However, using some scripts and our APIs, it is possible to link our maps with the presence sensors.