As many of you have already experienced, "Room and Equipment Reservations" template from Fantastic 40 Application Templates is weak and poorly designed. Default list and calendar views for lists such as Reservations only display current user's reservations and if an administrator tries to change or create a all item calendar view, this view will display all items including "non-reservation" item. This "non-reservation" item is created in Reservations list when a user creates a new resource in Resources list. This is due to Microsoft's "brilliant" hidden field called RERStatus.
The way "Room and Equipment Reservations" template works is that users with Contribute or higher permission can create a new resource (room, equipment, etc) in Resources list and the workflow will start as soon as the item is created to make the same item in Reservations list with Available status. When this happens, this "non-reservation" item is created in Reservations list. The value for the hidden field, RERStatus, is changed during the workflow and all pre-defined views in the template make a use out of it. By default, you won't be able to see the value of this hidden field nor change the value. However, Kenneth Scott has a great post in his blog on how to make the hidden field visible but not editable: http://programmerramblings.blogspot.com/2008/03/adventures-with-wss30-room-and.html.
Another thing that I found was that with you logged in as System Account, "setup" workflow in Resources list will not automatically start. Basically, if the workflow does not start automatically or fails to start, you will NOT be able to make reservations – the resource will appear as if it is fully reserved forever.
However, if you create a resource with any other account with Contribute or higher permission, the "setup" workflow will work smoothly. So, keep this in mind when you are using System Account as a service account for testing "Room and Equipment Reservations" template.
You can also customize your "Room and Equipment Reservations" template to integrate with Microsoft Outlook and Patrik Luca has a great post in his blog (Patrik Luca's Blog) that talks about this customization in SharePoint Designer: http://patrikluca.blogspot.com/2008/03/extension-to-rooms-and-equipment.html. I tried this customization but I figured out that Outlook with Exchange Server does not work – I get the javascript error.
Hope this helps!
tigirry
Just a question/comment about the calendar view…
In my implementation, I have added a title to the reservations schema. If I create a new calendar view for the reservations list, several “non-reservations” show up, as you said. These can be hidden by filtering out any “reservations” that have a null title (i.e. show items where title is not equal to ). However, in neither case do all reservations show up (25 out of 68 show up when the null titles are removed and 27 out of ?? show up when the null titles are included)
By the way: of those 27 records, 10 are null titles, which means that 8 valid records become invisible when you don’t filter the null titles…
I hope that made sense…
If anyone knows why less than half of the items that should be showing up are showing up, I’d be greatful