Add-ons and maximum booking time

We are happy to announce the release of Calira v2.4.9. Besides multiple bug fixes and performance improvements, we’ve introduced add-ons for internal equipment bookings, maximum booking time rules for peak hours and aggregated data for reports.

Add-ons:

Some of you will know add-ons from using our marketplace, which are now also available for guests and lab members who book internal equipment. We also made the pricing more flexible than only fixed prices by introducing the following additional options:

• User specified – The user can specify the quantity at the time of booking or when editing a booking. For example, specify the number of samples that are being analyzed.
• As booking hours – The quantity will be the same as the booking hours. For example, the user wants technical support throughout the booking.
• As booking days – The quantity will be the same as booking days. For example, the customer wants to add overnight storage to a booking.

The add-ons are always optional for Lab Admins, Technicians and Instructors of the equipment.

Peak hours:

It is now possible to set maximum booking times per day, week and month in the equipment settings. You can also define your lab’s peak hour times and decide if the maximum booking time rule applies only during the peak hours.

You can combine the rule in the equipment settings with the group settings where you can limit the equipment usage per group member per day, week, month or at any given time.

Reports:

In our advanced reports, we now support reports with aggregated data (orders, booking minutes, costs). The data can be aggregated by the following:

• Equipment
• Lab
• Group
• User

It will be possible to aggregate data by projects and funding codes in the near future.

Earlier releases:

• New group setting: Hide equipment for untrained users
• Show rooms in the equipment selection boxes
• More filters for CSV reports (e.g. group, flexible time periods, etc)
• Lab admins, Technicians and Instructors are able to assign projects to guests
• Bug fix: the funding code expiry date cannot exceed 2 years

Upcoming features:

• Show groups for user selection boxes
• We are introducing a tag system for general announcements
• We are introducing support for booking batches of multiple instruments and recurring bookings

You can check out the latest resource planning tool version by logging in here. As always, reporting about any errors that you experience while using Calira or any feedback are greatly appreciated, as this allows us to improve the system.