MRBS - Meeting Room Booking System

I spent a few minutes this afternoon helping a fellow Edugeeker sort out some issues with MRBS. I first came across MRBS a couple of years ago when we were looking for a system to manage room bookings across our school site. It's a free, open source system written in PHP which is pretty easy to set up and customise.

The particular problem we faced (as would most UK high schools) was getting a two week timetable with holidays in the middle into a calendar application. I did a lot of work on this and came up with a process using MS Access which could be done at the start of each year or after a major set of changes to the master school timetable. This was fine, but I wasn't very happy about foisting something I'd knocked together with sellotape and bits of string onto our data manager, or about guaranteeing its reliability in what would be a critical system for the school. (If you want to see what I did, leave a comment - I'm happy to share). Off the back of that I played at creating a web app to convert a teacher's timetable into Outlook format. I nearly succeeded - you're welcome to try TimetableConverter, but as I write this it's not fully functional and won't be until I spend some more time on it (this summer?).

There were two other issues which prevented us from choosing this excellent piece of software, and in my experience they come up pretty regularly in the education sector and are applicable in many situations:

1. It would require staff to use yet another system, with all the username/password shenanigans and extra training that entails.
2. We couldn't find a company with the relevant expertise to support it at a reasonable cost.

We ended up using an extra module for Facility CMIS (sold by Serco) which does the job OK, but it's not something teaching staff can use easily. MRBS was far superior in terms of the interface, but it was just too much of a risk due to the lack of support out there.

I think there may well be a market for a company with the skills to set up, customise and support MRBS (and get the LDAP element working so active directory takes care of the authentication). As schools open up more and more of their sites through the Extended Schools initiative, this is only going to become more necessary, and the public who are looking to make bookings are going to start to expect to at least see what's available online before they call.