Council implements enterprise grade desk booking system

Interactive floor plans prove essential for desk booking in large, multi directorate office space

Portsmouth City Council is a prominent local authority serving the dynamic city of Portsmouth in Hampshire, England.  The council’s headquarters plays a vital role in overseeing and coordinating the various functions and services provided to the community.  A large, multi-wing, multi-floor building, it houses various different directorates responsible for delivering essential services such as Public Health, Children, Families and Education, Adult Social Care, and more.

The Council selected Essential as a partner to deliver a desk booking system across its office space. 

A key element of the desk booking system was the ability for users to select their preferred workspace from an interactive floor plan and according to the directorate in which they worked. 

Given the size of the building and number of different floors, ‘cores’ and directorates, the design of the user interface was a big priority in this project.

About the solution

ResourceXpress offers a workspace booking system that allows staff members to easily locate and book available workspaces, such as desks or meeting rooms, at its main offices after the lockdown period.

The implementation of ResourceXpress was aimed at facilitating a smooth transition back to the workplace and supporting staff in finding suitable spaces for collaboration and work.

To ensure a tailored experience for each staff member, the Council used the concept of “neighbourhoods” within their headquarters building, which were aligned with different Directorates. This alignment was integrated with the Council’s Active Directory, ensuring that employees could only view and access workspaces relevant to their specific Directorate.

This approach enabled teams within each Directorate to quickly identify and reserve appropriate spaces for their collaborative needs.

Essential Computing, the G Cloud partner for ResourceXpress, played a crucial role in assisting the Council throughout the planning and implementation process. They provided support in various aspects, including the design and mapping of the council building’s floor plans.

“As a customer with a large multi-level, multi-core building, we were initially concerned about the complexities of navigation. Essential exceeded our expectations by placing a strong emphasis on floor plan design and navigation to deliver the best end user experience. They also delivered a branded instructional video which has become an invaluable resource for our teams.”

Jeremy Underdown, Operational Property Manager at Portsmouth City Council

By leveraging this support, the Council was able to offer its staff a seamless and interactive floor plan navigation experience, further enhancing the usability of the ResourceXpress solution.

According to Jeremy Underdown, Operational Property Manager at Portsmouth City Council. “As a customer with a large multi-level, multi-core building, we were initially concerned about the complexities of navigation. Essential exceeded our expectations by placing a strong emphasis on floor plan design and navigation to deliver the best end user experience. They also delivered a branded instructional video which has become an invaluable resource for our teams.”

Advanced interactive floor plan navigation

ResourceXpress offers advanced, enterprise-level interactive floor plans for workspace booking.

In addition to enabling navigation of bookable resources on a floor by floor, location by location basis, navigational markers can be incorporated anywhere on a map.

This is ideal if you have a large office or campus, as markers can be used to quickly ‘jump’ between different floors, departments, desk zones, collaboration areas or even car parks.

You can also use markers to link to related content on your intranet or other locations. This can include help videos, health and safety information, advice on workplace attendance, and so on.

The system also can also display only those resources that the individual has the rights to book according to attributes in Microsoft Active Directory or other policies you choose to implement.

High performance interactive floor plans

Ensuring high-performance interactive floor plans for workspace booking can be challenging, especially when checking and displaying the free/busy status of what could be hundreds of desks simultaneously.

When multiple users access floor plans to book workspaces or view availability, the system must process numerous requests concurrently, which can put a strain on server resources and slow down response times.

ResourceXpress is proven to deliver high performance that significantly reduces the time taken to fetch resource status of hundreds of resources, whilst maintaining real-time accuracy to avoid double-bookings.

This makes it ideal for large offices and desk booking in particular.

To find out more about our workspace booking solutions or book a demonstration, get in touch>.