There are some instances where booking or reserving a specific desk, office or meeting room is necessary.
Other times, just knowing that a desk has been allocated and is available within a space, area, or floor is all one needs. It’s argued that by removing the picking or reserving of specific workspaces, so too is the friction of having to make yet another decision, before the person even gets into the workspace.
Less preloaded decisions. 
Lower friction to joining in-person work sessions. Higher utilization.
RESERVATIONS -- I have reservations about reservations. I have been saying this for a decade now. Just because something is going to be shared does not mean that it has to be reserved first. Plenty of very successful workplace mobility programs have achieved fairly high levels of oversubscription without the need for pre-booked desks. Booking systems almost always ADD friction and steps to employees' days, and require an enormous amount of work and components to make it work seamlessly. Also, don't forget that the hospitality contexts where we do make reservations (e.g. restaurants/hotels) also have PEOPLE in the mix to help (e.g. hosts/concierge). Tech won't solve it alone.
Increasingly, we’re seeing (and working with) platform developers exploring how they can help employees, employers and space operators with this, making space utilization both spontaneous and manageable.
Until now, if a platform’s developers wanted to leverage automatically-updated data around inventory, there’d only be two approaches: displaying all the individually available desks/options and letting users pick at random, or parsing the data and developing an algorithm to group and ungroup desks.
(We’d know, we’re the ones who built the APIs to provide this always-fresh workspace inventory data.)
Both approaches work fine today, but as decision-making is being delegated, and millions of employees are set to make 10s of millions of workplace decisions (and transactions) per week, we wanted to help developers implement an approach that would scale far better and create far less technical debt.
Resource Grouping
Platform developers can begin fetching Groups of resources, returning interactive pools that can be queried in exactly the same way as (and alongside) individual resources via Syncaroo, regardless of which integrated inventory or property management system the operator is using.
- Groups can be cached for internal display or search.
- Groups will have shared media, descriptions and pricing.
- Capacity and availability are double checked at booking time.
- Individual resources within the group are booked automatically.
- Availability counts (for now and near-future) are calculated automatically.
So whether your platform wants to show available options individually or offer group-based booking, Syncaroo’s unified API can get you setup, syncing and filling desks faster and more efficiently.
Bonus: Live Availability Counts
Alongside Grouping, our development team also snuck in another little end-of-year gift for the awesome platform developers we are already or about to start working with.
Location data sets will now also include a counts object giving platforms total counts of the inventory they’ve been given access to, as well as what quantity is available now, today and in the near future.
Whilst both are still very much in beta, they lay the foundation for a whole new generation of booking experiences, ones where community managers and workspace operators spend more time on hospitality tasks, than managing and tracking inventory or utilization across a growing number of disconnected systems.
Get Grouping & Counts
If you’re already set up for API access, ping your Syncaroo point-of-contact and they’ll enable Grouping & Counts for you.
If you’re not already developing with our unified API, get in touch and let’s get you started.
