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In this video I'll introduce Tangora's Booking module.
We'll take a look at how your end users find
a date and a time to book a given resource
and how you manage which resources are available and when.
The booking module allows your websites users to book resources
on your site.
These resources could be anything from a consultation with a person
like a doctor for example, to a physical place or object
like a meeting room or a video camera.
What they all have in common is that there is limited access
to the resource. And the booking module allows you to coordinate
booking the resource.
Though the booking module can be developed directly for your
customers, the module is also frequently used as an internal
tool used by your employees to make reservations on behalf
of your customers.
Up on screen I have an example implementation in our demo site
Frezz, a website for a fictive organic food company.
Here, I've chosen to build an example around booking
a nutritionist. And in the course of the video I may refer to our
nutritionists simply as our resources.
Our resources are displayed here over several pages
and we can use the built-in navigation to browse through
our available resources, and then we can get a bit more information
on the given resource by clicking on the name, and then we can
navigate back to our overview. As we can see, we are utilizing
some of many different optional search parameters at the top
so we can search for a given nutritionist by location,
gender or education, which, as you may guess by their
specificity, are parameters which, as the developer
of my site, I've created myself based on my needs.
So if the end user wants to find a PhD in Copenhagen
then we can see that a certain Thomas Bolton appears.
There is a reservation button that I've chosen to place both
in the overview and detail view. And if we click on 'Reserve',
we come to a form, where we can browse for and book
a date and time.
Before we go ahead and book, I want to make you aware
of the fact, that as the developer of the site
you have total control over the way your resources
are displayed. The graphic design is fully customizable
with Tangora's powerful and intuitive point and click
layout tools.
Furthermore, which information is displayed
and in which order they appear is fully customizable.
You could, for example, choose to include a photo
of your resources in the overview, or perhaps even
decide to disable the detailed view altogether and show
all the relevant details of your resources on the same page.
You can even create separate pages that show only
a preselected expert of your available resources
if for example you wanted to have a separate page
for resources available in each city.
Well, let's go ahead and book a nutritionist.
First, we'll notice that we can select a start
and end date, as well as a start and end time
and we'll notice that there is calendar on the page
which indicates when the resource is available.
The green block represents a time which has already
been booked, and there's a difference in the shading here
based on whether it's pre-booked or confirmed.
The developer of the site controls the display
and there is a 'legend' button here under the calendar
which can make available to help your end user.
So we can select a date and a time directly
in these fields, but there is also an option to choose
a date and time by clicking in the actual calendar
which I'll do now.
Then the end user can enter in a name, e-mail and perhaps
a comment of some sort. As the sites developer
you could choose to gather additional information
such as a telephone numbers or an address, and you can
freely make fields required or optional.
And then we'll just hit 'send' and then we can see that we get
a customized feedback message with a link back to
our resource overview.
The message tells me that the reservation has been sent in
and is awaiting internal confirmation, and that
upon confirmation, I'll receive a confirmation e-mail.
As the sites developer, you choose whether or not
to enable or disable this option for requiring
internal confirmation.
The email, which I've just brought up on screen
contains a link to cancel the reservation
if the event arises.
And here we can see the cancellation page.
I would like to show you here on the reservations page
that we also have an advanced option to repeat the reservation
periodically. So if I wanted to take each Friday for
the next four weeks, I could follow the recipe
here at the bottom.
Basically here, I'm saying that I want to book every week
on a Friday, 3 times in addition to my current reservation
so a total of four times.
Let's take a brief look now at the administration environment
for your booking.
I have up on screen the booking module in Tangora Manager
where you administer all aspects of your Tangora solution.
And what we can see here is a listing of our resources.
There is a button up here to create the categories which
you'll be able to assign your resources.
And if we click on a given resource, we can see
the information that you can make available for your resource.
I have a show / hide checkbox, to decide whether to make
my resource active on my site or not. And then I have
information on the resource's name, my customized
category information, description texts
as well as associated files and links.
Up by the name button, there's a status button here too
so I can see when this resource has been booked and when
it is available. You'll notice that for Thomas Bolten
Tuesday is unavailable. And If I go a bit further down
we can see that there are availability properties here.
Basically this is a schedule for when the resource
is available, so we can see that Thomas has the day off
on Tuesdays. We can also see that you are able to take
holidays into account, and indeed, you have the option
to create and administer your own list of holidays.
At the bottom, there're some advanced properties, relating to
how long the resource can be booked, and if there should be
time buffers between bookings. Back at the top, we'll notice
that you have the option to copy the current resource
which helps make the process of adding resources a snap.
If I click on the breadcrumb navigation up here at the top
I come to the interface, where I can see that there are options
relating to the properties and standards of your
list of resources. Now, these are things like choosing colors
date and time formats, as well as enabling or disabling the option
to require your guest's reservations to be approved internally.
And you'll also see a reservations button
which I'd like to take a look at now. Here, we have an overview
of who has booked. And if you have internal approval enabled
this will be where you approve your reservations.
There's a search option at the top, where you can choose
to view only those reservations that have yet to be approved
and then you can click on the details of the reservation
and review the information. You can approve by hitting
the edit button, and then, at the bottom, hitting
the 'approve' button.
As we've seen, the booking module is a powerful tool
filled with useful features that can be applied
in a variety of situations.
Thank you for watching.