Hi!
We are currently evaluating Fab Manager for our Makerspace Creapolis in Coburg, Germany. Over all it matches our use case pretty nicely as we also have mandatory courses for our machines and want to enforce this via the reservation platform. Unfortunately I have not yet understood how to do some of the normal everyday tasks. We have about 35 different machines that can be reserved each week day from 9:00 to 18:00 with Wednesday and Thursday even until 20:00. My understanding is that I can either have 5 machine slots with all machines for the 5 week days or have 5 slots per machine. Both cases of course would have the slots repeat weekly. 35 machines with 5 slots each would be 175 slots though which is a little unwieldy.
The issue is that neither model seems to support all normal everyday operations like:
- Closing early: No longer allow reverations for some time of the day and show which reservations need to be canceled
- Adding an event or course and block a space and the machines within
This seems to be made much worse by the fact that Reservation blocks can’t be edited (except dropping single machines) and only deleted after emptying them from all reservations. This seems totally impractical to me. So I guess there must be a way around that that everyone is using and I am just not getting.
If you have all machines in the same slot how does one add a (new) machine? Just recreate the blocks in the far future and have separate blocks in the mean time? Dropping all future reservation to create new slots can obviously not be the solution, right?
Fab Manger supports to add machines to spaces. But this doesn’t seem to do anything. How does one block a larger number of machines? Of course one can just create a reservation but clicking through dozens of machines and slots does not seem very practical. Or is this what every one just does?
Excuse my French!
Florian