MRBS is a free application to book meeting rooms. It is a PHP based application, and works like a web application. You can install it on any server in your organization, and then employees in your organization can access this application over the web, and book meeting rooms. As the application is installed locally on your own server, it is a good choice for booking meeting rooms in an intranet environment as well.
MRBS is extremely easy to setup and use. MRBS needs a database to store all the data. You can use either MySQL or PostgreSQL. As both of these are free, you do not need to spend any money on buying a proprietary database. Once MRBS is installed, it is very easy to add data to it. You start by adding meeting rooms. Then you can create users with different access, like admin users, normal users, and read-only users.
Booking a meeting room is extremely easy with MRBS. When anyone wants to book a meeting room, they can access MRBS web application. In this, you can select the room that you want to book, and exact date, time and duration for which you want. MRBS ensures that if the room is not available at that time, it would not let you create another entry for that.
MRBS has very good interface. You can easily see all the bookings for any day, week, or even complete month. This comes very handy so you can easily see which slots are available.
Here are some other good features of this free Meeting Room Booking System:
- Can be accessed by a browser, so no installation required for each user.
- Very intuitive interface.
- Authentication with your existing user database (eg Netware, NT Domain, NIS etc.)
- You can create repeated bookings easily.
- Booking views available for any Day, Week, or Month.
- You can setup room administrators. Those can be notified by email when a meeting is setup.
- Works in both MySQL as well as PostgreSQL.
- Available in multiple languages, including, Catalan, Czech, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.
- Completely free.
As mentioned on MRBS website, this is a pretty stable system, and is being used by organizations of all sizes all over the world. Some people have also put it to interesting uses such as booking restaurant tables and aeroplanes at a flying school! If you are looking for a free web based meeting room booking system, this would be a good choice. If you are interested in web based meetings, try DimDim, or GoLiveRoom.