This is a side project we built at Aerolab to show which meeting rooms are currently available (and for how long), as well as giving you the ability to anonymously book a room for 15' with a single tap. This is all based on Google Calendar in a typical Google Apps for Business package.
The motivation behind this is that most meeting room software is needlessly complicated (and expensive!), so we built exactly what we needed as a Web App, which is then deployed to a bunch of cheap Fire HD 8 tablets (one per room) using a headless web browser. It's simple, it works well to let people know that they shouldn't use a specific meeting room, and it looks kind of cool.
Proof of Concept built using React + Node.JS.
This is the most complicated step, as you are going to need to add two JSON files to make things work: A Google Credentials File, and a list of Meeting Rooms (also known as Resources in Google Calendar).
Go to the Google Developer Console and create a new Project. After that's done, you need to do a few more things:
- From the Library menu, you need to Enable the Google Calendar API (use the search if it's not in the popular list)
- From the Credentials menu, Create a Service Account, and select JSON as the key type. Save this file as you'll need it in a while.
- Take note of the Service Account ID as well (it looks like accountname@(...).iam.gserviceaccount.com)
- Rename the JSON key file to rooms-client.json and place it in the root of the project.
Go to Google Calendar and click edit on each meeting room calendar. For each one of them do the following:
- On the Calendar Details tab, Take note of the Calendar ID (it looks like [email protected]).
- Under the Share this Calendar, Share it with the Service Account ID (add accountname@(...).iam.gserviceaccount.com to the calendar and give it full access)
After you've done that, you need to Create a rooms.json file in the root of the project detailing all the enabled rooms, their names and Calendar IDs, using a slug as the key. It should look like this:
{
"lounge": {"name": "Lounge", "id": "[email protected]"},
"super-room": {"name": "Super Room", "id": "[email protected]"}
}Start the server with npm run start.
Open a browser on http://localhost:3000/room-slug (not literally, you have to replace room-slug with the proper room key, like lounge or super-room). You should be able to see the current status of the room and book it.
We provide a Dockerfile, which you can easily use on Now, or any other service you prefer. We are not using any sort of authentication or environment variables as this is a quick internal project, but you're free to add some sort of auth if you want.
MIT.