roomRequest Spark Bot - for all!
What started out as an idea for a hackathon, has become a very useful tool inside Cisco. Not only is it a great demo, but it saves a ton of time. Anyone that has to schedule conference rooms in a corporate environment will understand the pain of trying to find an available room that is the right size and in my case, has video conferencing capabilities. roomRequest is a Cisco Spark bot that interfaces with Microsoft Exchange to determine what rooms are free and allows the user to easily book the room of their choice right from Spark. Since this is a bot, it can be done from the Spark desktop app, web browser, or even mobile application.
Ever since we released this inside of Cisco, I have been asked, “My customer loved that bot, can they get the code?”. Since it was written very quickly for the hackathon, I never intended for the code to be easily reused. After enough requests, I finally sat down and refactored everything. Hopefully customers will find this code simple to deploy and customize for their one environments. Here are some screenshots of the bot in action.
New users can type "Help" for guidance.
Booking Conversation – The bot will ask questions until it has gathered up all the details to lookup available rooms.
Single Shot Request – Once the user is familiar with the required fields, a request can be made with a single message!
To learn how to deploy roomRequest for your own organization, click here
If you have any questions or suggestions on making roomRequest better, let me know!
– Brad