H-FARM supports the creation of new business models and the transformation and education of young people and companies from a digital perspective. Founded in 2005, it was the first company in the world to adopt a model capable of combining investments, business consultancy and digitally augmented training programs in a single place. H-FARM is today the largest innovation center in Europe.
Work contexts are increasingly fluid. A flexibility that companies must manage effectively and simply, to make the work of their employees better and more efficient. However, to ensure that meeting room management is an agile, comfortable and controlled experience, adequate tools are needed. With several rooms and many environments available for holding meetings and gatherings, H-FARM turns to us with the need to create a meeting room reservation management system, in order to avoid the classic situations in which free rooms cannot be found. In particular, the requests made to our technical team are:
- create a native iOS app to be installed on each iPad positioned at the entrance to the meeting rooms;
- create a section dedicated to the management and booking of rooms within the native H-FARM app in order to allow access to the service even remotely and on the move;
- allow you to easily view room availability and book immediately in the desired time slot;
- integrate the system with Google Calendar;
- view the events present in the different areas during the day;
- create a control panel to manage the trees of the various meeting rooms.
On a technological level, the most demanding challenge was managing to maintain the developed system, constantly synchronized with the room calendars present in the various Google Calendars. To do this we first organized a database with the details of all the events already scheduled, taking care of permissions and authorization to access the information present on the different calendars. Once this phase was completed, through the use of the Google Calendar API, we were able to integrate the reception of real-time change notifications from each room calendar. Specifically, we have made available the reporting of new bookings, changes or removal of an event - in order to allow constant synchronization.
To avoid overlapping events, we have developed a tool that allows you to carry out operations on Google Calendar and bring them back into our system only at the time of confirmation.
Once we had created and maintained a backend in constant synchronization with Google Calendar, we began the development phase of both apps, in order to support requests for constantly updated information and carry out the required operations via REST API. This was followed by the design phase, which saw us busy creating a graphic interface with a simple and intuitive UI and a set of icons created specifically.
