Integrating with Yesplan for smoother room booking management

Here at Action Links, one of our primary functions is to provide venues with the ability to flexibly integrate in new ways with the business systems that underpin day-to-day operations. Most of the time this focuses on processes that exist to serve your customer as the end-user - however recently we’ve also started to see arts venues using Action Links for solutions specifically for staff teams to use, helping them to interact more closely with technology that your venue is already using.

This could be Finance systems, HR systems, or in the case of Amgueddfa Cymru, an events management system, Yesplan, which they use to allocate resources and meeting rooms internally.

The challenge

Amgueddfa Cymru is a group of seven national museums located across Wales, each with their own workforce and unique campus of buildings. As you can imagine, diary management planning of what’s happening at each museum on any given day, (both behind the scenes and front of house) is a pretty complex juggle! In the past, each separate museum had it’s own way of managing room bookings - some sites used Outlook calendars, some were using Excel spreadsheets and in some cases paper diaries were still being used. While these worked at a local level, it was very difficult for anyone outside a specific site to know which rooms were available to use.

To help organise this, Amgueddfa Cymru introduced Yesplan in 2024 and now use it as a single source of truth to manage room usage across all of the museums (as well as hot-desk bookings). However with a large workforce of over 700 people, not all staff members have access to Yesplan to view or manage room availability (this requires a Yesplan login which is limited to a small group). This was causing issues with staff seeing an empty meeting room and deciding to use it without making a booking, only to discover that someone else had already booked it and was about to arrive.

Amgueddfa Cymru needed a quick and accessible way for anyone working in their buildings - staff, visitors, or contractors - to be able to easily look up room availability for any meeting room, at any museum, on any given date and time, in order to help plan their meetings more efficiently and ensure there was definitely space available. They wanted this to be open to everyone to use - not just Yesplan users. To take this one step further, outside each meeting room Amgeuddfa Cymru wanted to dynamically display today’s upcoming room bookings on a small screen, automatically pulling live availability data directly from Yesplan.

The brief

We worked with the Amgueddfa Cymru team to plan a solution that would…

• Allow anyone to look up meeting room availability online, without having to login to Yesplan
• Allow the user to specify which museum (of seven) that they would like to view room availability for
• Display room availability for any upcoming date that the user chooses
• Display room availability in a layout that allows an at-a-glance understanding of which rooms are busy/available
• Summarise details of room bookings already in place (meeting title and meeting owner) in case staff wanted to approach that person to request swapping rooms
• Collate a list of today’s upcoming bookings and available slots to show on screens outside each meeting room

The solution

The first step in building this solution required a connection to be set up between Amgueddfa Cymru’s instance of Yesplan and their Action Links account. Adding a new integration between Action Links and a third-party system is very simple and entirely accessible for a venue to set up themselves, taking just a few minutes to input their API key credentials from Yesplan. Once this was in place, the next task was to build the availability look-up page.

This works by querying the Yesplan API and fetching all of the different meeting rooms that exist within the Yesplan set up. Action Links sorts these into the seven separate museum sites before displaying each museum in a ‘Choose a site’ dropdown. The user can then select the specific date they’re looking for a room for, before Action Links then requests from Yesplan the availability for all meeting rooms at that site, on that date.

Using some html styling magic, results are displayed in a table layout to allow for easy comparison across all meeting rooms, with availability broken down in 15 minute time chunks. If a room is taken, we mark this with a different colour and surface booking details from Yesplan including event name, start time, end time and owner. A clean, simple layout that provides just the right amount of info that a staff member may need when trying to see what spaces are free/taken.

One added challenge that Amgueddfa Cymru brought to us was the concept of a space that could be flexibly partitioned (called the Oriel Suite), transitioning from 3 smaller rooms into 1 single larger room with the removal of folding walls. This means that if any of the 3 smaller rooms are booked, the Oriel Suite should show as ‘unavailable’ because all 3 small rooms need to be available in order for a booking of the Oriel Suite to be taken. Action Links handles this with some conditional formula logic that Amgeuddfa Cymru can access and adjust in the future if this requirement changes (e.g. if the Oriel Suite becomes bookable with just 2 smaller rooms rather than all 3, for example).

The second step to meet the brief required us to create a summary page of today’s upcoming bookings for display screens outside each separate meeting room. Rather than build individual pages for each room, we created one single Action Links page which dynamically loads an individual room’s availability based on the URL parameter ?location=. As Amgueddfa populate this parameter with the name of each meeting room, Action Links dynamically requests the availability for that specific room from Yesplan.

At the top of the page we display the room name, today’s date and the current time. Below this we then list out upcoming bookings (including booking owner), as well as which times throughout the day between bookings that the room is free to use. If a booking is in progress at the current time, the page is configured to calculate how much time is left on that booking and thus when the room becomes available again. Add to this some simple colour styling (red for a booking, green for available) and Amgueddfa typefaces and the end result is a super clear overview, that’s easy to comprehend and looks and feels like the venue.

The impact

The team at Amgueddfa Cymru are delighted with the outcome - so much so that they’ve added the new look-up page to their Intranet so a much broader set of staff can now interact with the bookings stored in Yesplan. By integrating these two systems together, we're now providing a front-end destination for all staff to view specific information relevant to them, extending the accessibility of Yesplan beyond just the team members with logins.

Although the Yesplan API doesn’t allow us to create a new booking outside of the Yesplan application, there is capability for our integration to update custom fields on an existing booking, so to take this to the next level a venue could add ‘Edit’ functionality to the availability look-up page allowing a booking owner to add further details such as number of participants or equipment required, via the Action Links screen. The Amgueddfa Cymru team are already looking at other ways to keep extending the integration and we can’t wait to see what they do next.