SharePoint 2013 OOTB features for booking systems

Question

I'm working for a company that's looking to move over to SharePoint 2013, however, I've been proposed a question that I'm not sure the answer of, mind helping me out?

"Facilities require a company-owned accommodation booking systems using SharePoint 2013.

• How would you approach it?
• What functionality and features in out of the box SharePoint 2013 do you think may be useful to the booking system?

id really appreciate it as I'm working to try sell 2013 or possible SharePoint online, however, this has confused me.

Answer 1

The booking system is considered a Document Management System and the SharePoint is one of the most powerful Documents Management Systems that provide the below OOTB features:

• Version control.
• Approval/Review Workflow.
• Access Control (Permission/ Security).
• Alerts / Notification.
• Search / Content indexing.
• Auditing.
• Unique Document IDs.
• Content Type and Document Set.
• Metadata Properties.
• Microsoft Office Integration.
• Offline Editing.
• Document Center.
• Retention Policy.
• Audience Targeting
• Mobile Accessibility.

Check the details features at Sharepoint Document Management System (DMS) Features

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My suggestion

• Move to SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint Online directly.

• Before you start building Booking system on SharePoint you should answer the following:

  • What kinds of documents and other content can be created in an organization?
  • What template to use for each kind of document?
  • What metadata to provide for each kind of document?
  • Where to store a document at each stage of its life cycle?
  • How to control access to a document at each stage of its life cycle.
  • How to move documents within the organization as team members contribute to the documents' creation, review, approval, publication, and disposition?
  • What's the permission level required?
  • What's the workflow required?
  • What's The capacity of your documents?

For more details check Overview of document management in SharePoint

Answer 2

If your company is already using Active Directory and Outlook of the Microsoft's products, you can build the Accommodation Booking System around it and have it hosted on SharePoint using its built-in functionalities with SP2013 or SP Online.

Instead of addressing this as a document-driven tool, I'd get started with a list-based approach. SharePoint's built-in app Calendar has the necessary functionality in it to fetch items from AD and control them as time-spanning events taking into considerations accommodation booking related matters such as "participants" and overlapping.

Outside the SharePoint, the rooms (or whichever would be the objects of the accommodation booking system) would need to be added to AD as items mimicking how traditional meeting rooms would be handled in AD.

There are existing articles detailing a bit further the steps to be done:

• Enable reservation of resources in a calendar
• Conference Rooms Reservation Solution for SharePoint. Integrating SharePoint with Exchange