Audience: Facility managers, reservation coordinators, workplace/office managers
This page explains what Reservation Sync does, what it does not do, and how you can check that it works as expected. Use the test scenarios in Room-centric calendar integration: example scenarios during acceptance testing and whenever you want to check behavior later.
Be sure to check out Features, prerequisites & limitations and Room-centric synchronization explained for concrete reservation flow examples. Below chapters are only summaries.
What Reservation Sync is
- A link between the room calendars in Microsoft Exchange or Google Workspace and the rooms in Workplace.
- Reservations for a linked room are synchronized in both directions in near real time: create, change (subject, time, room) and cancel. Single and recurring reservations, one room or several rooms (up to 100) per reservation.
- Workplace can act on behalf of the room: accept or decline a reservation, release the room after a no-show, free it when a meeting ends early.
- With Microsoft Exchange, Spacewell offers a safety net: real-time conflict resolution and a nightly reconciliation that fixes reservations that went out of sync.
What Reservation Sync is not
- Not a personal-calendar integration. Workplace cannot change or cancel the organizer’s own Outlook/Google meeting. If a room is released, the meeting stays in the organizer’s calendar, without the room. See Room-centric synchronization explained
- Not "edit anywhere". A reservation can only be changed in the system where it was created. A reservation made in Outlook cannot be changed in Workplace (a reservation coordinator can cancel it in Asset, which releases the room, but does not change the organizer’s calendar).
- Not a master-data sync. Room names and capacities are not copied between Exchange/Google and Workplace. Change them in both.
- Not for services and equipment. Catering or equipment cannot be added via Outlook/Google Calendar, nor added in Asset to a reservation created in Outlook/Google. Spacewell is working to support “add catering or equipment in Asset to a reservation created in Outlook” soon.
- Not instant. Most changes appear within seconds, some take up to about 3 minutes. See Sync timing & delays
- Not a fix for configuration that allows double reservations. If a room in Exchange or Workplace is set to allow conflicts, reconciliation does not take this into account, and will cancel any double bookings.
- Not for every Workplace feature. Composed rooms, room compositions, blocked dates/regimes, set-up and clean-up times, "reserve in advance from a pre-defined period", conflict tolerance and approval workflows are not supported for synchronized rooms.
- Not the same for Google. Real-time conflict resolution and reconciliation are available for Microsoft Exchange only.
What you are responsible for
- Keep each room configured the same in Workplace and in Exchange/Google: name, capacity, how far ahead it can be booked.
- Do not configure regimes or set-up /clean-up times on synchronized rooms in Asset; they do not exist in Exchange.
- Tell IT and your Spacewell contact when rooms are added, renamed or removed.
- Make sure the right people receive failure notifications and reconciliation report e-mails (Spacewell consultant configures these in the Integration Platform Sync Settings). See Settings configured in the Integration Platform
- Follow up the reconciliation report e-mail, if your organization uses "Report" mode, and inform users whose conflicting reservation you remove.