Tech Forum

Our stake center has an outside pavilion. I am wondering how others in this situation have set this up -- as a separate location or as part of the stake center.

Currently we only allow the wards that attend the stake center to schedule it. But other wards need to be able to schedule the pavilion. So we were going to set it up as a separate location. But many activities need both the pavilion and the stake center, and you can only select one location for an event. So for those events they would not be able to schedule it themselves, but would have to call the building scheduler.

Or we could have it as a location within the stake center, but then only a few wards could schedule it and the rest would have to call the scheduler. Unfortunately this is a no-win situation.

The other option is to let all the wards schedule the stake center, but we could only do that if we have all the necessary time reserved for those wards who actually meet there. But currently they don't reserve specific weekend nights for specific wards, although we would need still to prevent other wards from scheduling those nights. If we could assign reservations to multiple wards we could resolve this. This would help for the weeknights too; there are so many exceptions to the schedule when 3 wards have to share 2 nights that scheduling specific wards for specific rooms each night creates a maintenance nightmare for the scheduler.

So I have two enhancement requests. But until then, any suggestions?

We have set up our pavilions simply as custom "rooms" within the location. That eliminates the potential problem you mentioned with events that require the pavilions and the building.

We've also chosen to allow other wards to schedule it. Perhaps your stake has different usage patterns, but we find that wards that don't inhabit the building use the pavilions very rarely (I think less than 5 times in the whole year). So we have found no need to set up any reservations at all for the pavilions -- the first-come, first-served method works fine. We thus avoid the maintenance nightmare you worried about. We use normal conflict resolution processes if by chance priorities don't match the first-come, first-served method.

In our Stake we set it up as a seperate location. I found this to be the better solution versus including it as part of the stake center. I have all wards in our stake set up to reserve the Pavilion on a first come first serve basis. If someone does need the stake center in conjunction with the pavilion they would need to schedule it seperatley. Our stake allows all units the ability to reserve the stake center, although it would be an extra step to create an additional event and schedule the stake center, I think it is better to have them as seperate locations in the event that someone schedules the entire facility (stake center) that would block anyone from using the pavilion if it isn't really needed. This way they can be managed independently of one another.

Thanks. Yeah, I didn't think the other wards used the pavilion much -- mine has never used it -- but the scheduler says they use it quite a bit. But it's all relative.

Sorry I wasn't clear, it's not setting up reservations for the pavilion that's the issue but rather setting up reservations for the rest of the building so the other wards can schedule the pavilion without encroaching on the "rights" of the "native" wards.

junyur wrote:I think it is better to have them as seperate locations in the event that someone schedules the entire facility (stake center) that would block anyone from using the pavilion if it isn't really needed.

Thanks. Yes, this was one of the reasons I initially was going to use a separate location for it.

The way I see it, you have two choices:

1) Make the Pavilion a separate location. If an event need to use the stake center and the pavilion, then you'd have to put one of them on another calendar. Perhaps the one you use for weddings and such.

2) Make the Pavilion part of the stake center and allow the wards to create events there. While it would be nice to prevent them from scheduling events where they shouldn't, I'm not sure as it would be a problem. They still need to find someone with a key and you can take them to task for "breaking the rules" if they get out of line. Since they're not in the habit of making events at the stake center, I tend to doubt they'll suddenly start doing it now that the software lets them.

The latter option is probably true. At this point the scheduler thinks we should just have all pavilion scheduling go through her for now, and we may do that, but we're starting to take a more lenient attitude towards reservations and just give the wards some accountability for doing the right thing and making them understand that they can be forced to change something.

craiggsmith wrote:At this point the scheduler thinks we should just have all pavilion scheduling go through her for now

I'm sure mostly because "that's always the way we've done it". The problem is she only has access (maybe) to her own ward's calendar. She can't place any events that use the pavilion on any other ward's calender.

The other alternative is to treat the ward's use much like the way private/family events are done. The wards simply have to use "Other location" on their calendar and the Building Scheduler places it on her "Weddings" calender to book the resource.

We finally decided to make the pavilion part of the stake center but not open up the stake center to the other wards, so they'll have to go through the scheduler. Thanks everyone.

Our new pavilion is not at the stake center, but at a nearby meetinghouse. On a related note, I decided to create a location for the Family History Center. Although it is located within the stake center, I didn't want anyone reserving the entire stake center, since the FHC is scheduled separately. I use that FHC location to put the operating hours of the FHC on a stake calendar.

Dana