Introducing Calpendo Enterprise – multiple Calpendo sites operating as a single federation.
Aims
Calpendo is used by our customers primarily to help manage bookable resources and services that are available in their facility.
Sometimes, this might be a single department or core facilities that uses Calpendo, but in the past it was sometimes used by customers who wanted a single Calpendo for multiple departments.
However when you add multiple facilities into one Calpendo, it becomes exponentially complicated or you have to dumb them all down to some common denominator. It would be okay if they all operate the same way, but not if they all have their own distinct requirements.
We therefore felt that we would like to have a single system for multiple facilities which retains Calpendo’s unique extreme versatility for providing bespoke behaviour without suffering an explosion of complexity.
So we designed a system with multiple Calpendo sites that can each have very different configuration and behaviour, but work together as a single federation so that users see them all as a single system.
Information flows between them within whatever limits are allowed so that people can access all Calpendo sites as if they were a single system, and reports can aggregate data from across the whole federation.
This is what we call Calpendo Enterprise.
Sharing
Anybody running a facility wants control over their facility and its resources. They will also sometimes want to allow suitable people from other departments to access their facility.
A site admin can therefore choose which, if any, of their bookable resources should be shared with other sites in the federation.
This means you can have a bookings calendar that shows bookings from multiple Calpendo sites within the federation, and that you can make bookings for any of them from the calendar.
When you make a booking for a resource from another Calpendo site then the booking request is sent to that Calpendo so that its rules and workflows are the ones invoked.
In this way, each Calpendo still controls what bookings are allowed for its resources.
Sharing Users
We’ve seen with a number of our customers that facilities within a wider organisation will work together. Therefore their Calpendo sites should be able to reflect how administrators on one site could be regular users on another site and regular users themselves could use different sites belonging to different facilities.
Therefore Calpendo Enterprise manages the same user with different roles across multiple sites. Calpendo Enterprise provides for this through user management which defines Enterprise and site specific settings.
Sharing Projects
As well as users being able to work across multiple Calpendo sites in an Enterprise (where permitted) and resources being made available for booking on other systems it is also possible to share projects across multiple Calpendo systems. Just as for resources and users this can be tightly controlled so that information is protected.
The project though is a natural location to store key contact information and payment information such as a charge code as well as the users who are allowed to use a charge code.
If a project is then shared between facilities and their Calpendo systems so that the users from the project on the original site can book against the same project on a different facility the key information should be visible. This is the global data for that project.
Each project can also store information local to that facility so if a project is being used on both a microscopy facility and an MRI facility it can have separate tabs, only visible within those respective facilities, for storing the information for that project relevant to that facility.
Multi-site Reports
When using Calpendo Enterprise, our reporting tool will show information only from the current site by default. However, you can now ask it to include data from other sites in the federation so that you can aggregate data from across them all.
This allows for reports to be pulled together from all sites in the federation. In addition this data can then be aggregated so that individual reports can cover data across multiple sites.
Release Date
We’ve been working towards Calpendo Enterprise for a long time now as we wanted to make sure it met our original aims successfully. We believe we are now finally ready to show you what Calpendo Enterprise can do for you.
We know that due to the size and scope of Enterprise installations we will only be able to focus on select customers. However we are always ready to talk to you if you think that Enterprise will make a difference not just for your own facilities in a faculty or even across a larger multi site company or university.