Rooms & equipment

A way to stop two people booking the same room at the same time.

Say you have a boardroom. Ada wants it Tuesday at 10. Tunde wants it Tuesday at 10. Neither of them knows about the other, so Tuesday comes, both turn up, and one has to leave.

Most offices fix this with a notebook at reception or a WhatsApp group. This fixes it inside the calendar people already use.

You give the boardroom its own calendar, the same way each of your staff has one. When Ada makes a meeting, she adds the boardroom to it — the same action as adding Tunde. The room checks its own calendar and replies in about a second:

• Nothing booked then — it says yes, and the meeting goes onto the room's calendar.
• Something already booked — it says no, before Ada has told anyone the meeting is on.

Do you need it? Only if you have rooms or equipment that people compete for. If your team is remote, or you have one room and five people, skip this. It will not help you.

The room gets an email address, like boardroom@yourcompany.com.

That address is only a name tag. No mail goes there. Nobody reads it. It exists because calendar software cannot invite a thing — it can only invite an address. So the room needs one in order to be invitable at all.

Being a name tag, it is not a mailbox: no password, no sign-in, no storage, no cost. And an address a person already has cannot be reused for a room. The invitation would reach the person instead, and the room would never be reachable.

"The room answers for itself" just means nobody is asked. There is no receptionist and no approval step. The software reads the room's calendar and replies.

Four things are worth knowing before you tell your staff about it.

Outlook users cannot book rooms. Outlook does not work with calendars outside Microsoft. Your staff need Mailyte's own webmail, or Apple Calendar, or Thunderbird, or DAVx⁵ on Android. If most of your people are on Outlook, this feature will not work for them, and there is nothing we can do about that.

In Mailyte's webmail, rooms are a list to pick from. Make a meeting and choose the room under Guests — nobody needs to remember its address. In other calendar apps, like Apple Calendar or Thunderbird, there is no list, so whoever books has to type boardroom@yourcompany.com correctly. That is the reason to keep room addresses short and obvious.

You cannot look at a room's diary. No screen shows what the boardroom has booked next week. To find out, invite it to a test meeting and read the reply.

People outside your company are not told. Sending invitations out by email is switched off on this server for now. The room books correctly, but an outside guest hears nothing about the meeting.

1. Go to Rooms & equipment and press Add a room.
2. Name it what people actually call it. Boardroom, not Room 2B.
3. Pick your domain, then type a short first part. boardroom becomes boardroom@yourcompany.com. Keep it short: people booking from a phone or Thunderbird have to type it.
4. Choose Room for a space, or Equipment for something that moves: a projector, a camera, a car. They behave the same; the label is for you.
5. Seats and location are optional notes. They change nothing about how it works.
6. Leave Answer bookings automatically on. Turned off, the room does not refuse clashes — it simply never replies, and people are left waiting.
7. Add it, then book it yourself once and check the yes comes back.

To book a room in Mailyte's webmail, make a meeting and pick the room from the list under Guests. In other calendar apps there is no list: type the room's address into the guests or attendees box instead.

"That address already belongs to a mailbox." A person already has it. Pick another, such as boardroom-2.

"... is not one of your domains." The address has to be on a domain you own. Choose the domain from the dropdown instead of typing the whole address yourself.

The room never replies. Check Books itself in the list. If it says Off, that is why — switch it on.

Someone could not book it. Ask what they are using. If it is Outlook, that is the reason and there is no fix. On a phone or in Thunderbird, check they typed the address exactly right.

The room accepted two meetings that clash. It only knows about meetings it was invited to. If someone typed "Boardroom" into a meeting title instead of inviting the room, the room never heard about it.

I removed a room by mistake. Add it back with the same address. Its bookings come back with it.

• Creating mailboxes — addresses that belong to people
• Shared mailboxes — one address a team works from
• Go to Rooms & equipment