Booked 3.7 is here and it’s jam-packed full of goodies.
Reservation Payments
For years, Booked has allowed “payment” for reservations using credits. While credits continue to be supported (and even enhanced – see below), most folks want to pay for a reservation directly. Booked 3.7 supports payments using card or PayPal directly within the reservation workflow.
When configured, users will be prompted to pay for the reservation at the time of booking.
Price rules for reservation costs are very flexible. Rates can be set per hour or per reservation. Rates can even vary by hour to allow for increased pricing during high-demand periods. You can even charge different rates depending on user group membership.
You can also set when the payment is required – at the time of booking or before the reservation begins. Require a deposit? We support that, too.
Cascading Custom Attributes
A feature that people love about Booked is the ability add custom attributes – data fields that are unique to your organization. Booked 3.7 enhances this in a couple of ways. The first is the ability to add custom attributes that are dependent on other attributes.
For example, if you need to collect “Chair Configuration”, but only if the user has selected the “Breakout session” option for a custom “Meeting Type” attribute.
In this scenario, if the reservation owner chooses “Breakout session” as their Meeting Type, they will be asked to provide the Chair Configuration, as well.
User Managed Custom Attributes
The other custom attribute feature we added is the ability to set up user-managed custom attribute lists. This one is a little more nuanced, so let’s explore using an example.
Imagine a custom reservation attribute that collects a user’s preferred telephone number. Typically, this would be a free-form textbox, which is tedious and error prone. Setting this as a user-managed attribute, each user can provide their phone number(s) one time, then are presented with those options as a drop down list at the time of reservation.
This streamlines the reservation workflow and ensures data consistency over time.
New Credit Replenishment Rules
Until now, we have allowed credits to be replenished for members of a group at a scheduled interval. The only option was adding a fixed number of credits, though.
You can now add a fixed number of credits, but restrict the maximum number of credits a user will have. For example, you can add 100 credits every day, but never exceeding 1000 credits total in the user’s account.
The other option is to set the number of credits to a fixed amount. For example, if every user should start the month with exactly 1000 credits.
Monitor View Enhancements
People love Booked’s monitor view, but the number one request was to increase the scroll/refresh rate. We now support a scroll interval as low as 5 seconds.
We also beefed up the options for filtering the reservations to show. You can now pick any number of custom attributes in addition to the other settings, allowing you to configure both the amount and type of reservation data displayed.
Finally, you can now configure the reservation information displayed when using the list view using any available reservation label tokens.
Approval Bypass Rules
Reservation approvals are a powerful and simple way of centralizing control of reservation requests. Oftentimes, you’ll have a group of folks who are allowed to bypass the approval step and simply book the resource.
We now support setting a list of groups whose users will not enter the approval workflow.
Group Level Reservation Rules
Controlling how far in advance reservations can be made is a critical tool for many organizations. We’ve always supported this, but the rules have applied to everyone until now.
We now support setting notice rules for a group of users, allowing some folks to have more strict or relaxed rules for how far in advance they can book.
Automatic Group Routing of New Users
The process of managing user group membership can be tedious. We’ve long supported setting default group membership for new users, but we’re building on this with added rules.
Users can now be automatically routed into groups based on custom attribute values, email addresses, or other attributes.
MFA Using Authenticator App
Not long ago we introduced user account multi-factor authentication using one-time codes emailed to users.
In addition to getting codes emails, we now support using an Authenticator Application, like Google Authenticator. Each user can choose to enroll in MFA in their account profile.
Alternative API Authentication
The Booked API is such a powerful way to integrate with the application. One big limitation with the API is that it requires the user to authenticate, which is problematic when using browser-based SSO.
We now support generated user-specific API keys that can be used for API authentication. This bypasses SSO for API calls while keeping the API secured.
And more...
The list of features here isn’t exhaustive. This version of Booked has many more smaller features and enhancements that you’ll love.