The meeting room on the second floor, a studio shared by five instructors, two desks in a coworking space. While there are only a few people, a shared spreadsheet or a message in the group chat — “taking it at ten” — is enough. Then two people meet at the door holding the same calendar invite, someone blocks the room for the whole day “just in case”, and nobody knows whether it was tidied up after the last meeting.
That is why micali.online now has a third kind of booking next to events and services: rooms. They are shared spaces that only the people you approve can book — your employees, members, tenants. Everyone takes the room for as long as they need, within the rules you set, and you have everything in one place.
In this article we show how access through flags works, why the rules cannot be dodged even with two bookings back to back, what booking looks like for your people, and what your team does with it.
A room is not a service
With a service, a client books your time — a haircut, a massage, a consultation. With a room, your person books a space and chooses the time themselves: from ten until half past eleven, for a team meeting, for a call with a client. A room has:
- a name, a description and photos — where it is, how many people fit, what you will find inside,
- hours for each day of the week when it can be booked, with several ranges a day if needed,
- preparation and cleanup time in minutes before and after every booking (zero is fine),
- a time grid — every 15 minutes, for example — on which bookings start and end.
Who can book: flags
Access is handled by flags — labels you give people: Employees, Management, Members. One person can carry several flags, and a room decides which flags may book it; any one of them is enough. So you open the team meeting room to the Employees flag and the small room for management only to Management.
- Invitation: under Rooms → Access you paste email addresses, choose the flags and send the invitation. Nobody creates a password — people sign in with a one-time code sent to their email.
- Access request: someone who signs in and opens a visible room they cannot book yet can ask for access, with a short message. The responsible people approve the request (the person gets the room’s flags) or decline it, and either way the person gets an email.
- No flag means your team only: a room without a flag can be booked by your team alone. For a coworking space you can open it to anyone who signs in — deliberately, because anyone can sign in with any email address.
Visible or hidden
A visible room shows its photos, description, capacity, hours and rules to anyone with the link, but booking needs signing in and a flag. A hidden room looks like a page that does not exist to anyone who cannot book it — even if the link gets out, nobody sees a thing. There is no universal list of all rooms: only your people find a room, through your booking page or its direct link. You switch visibility with one toggle right in the list of rooms.
Rules that cannot be dodged
A shared room only works if one person does not take it for the whole week. For the bookings people make themselves, you therefore set:
- the longest booking — 2 hours, for example,
- the minimum break between one person’s own bookings in the same room — so the 2-hour limit cannot be dodged with two bookings of 2 + 2 hours back to back,
- how many days ahead people can book.
Your team — an admin, a manager or a responsible team member — can skip these limits and the hours when booking for someone else. One rule, though, holds always and for everyone: two bookings never overlap. Every new booking and every move locks the room for a moment, so even two people who clicked in the same second never get the same slot.
How your people book
On the room’s page, the person signs in and booking takes three steps:
- the day in a month calendar — only the days the room is open can be clicked,
- the start in a grid of times — taken times stay in the grid, just greyed out, so you see at a glance when the room is free; neighbouring times of one booking merge into a single bar with its time and name, if the room shares names,
- the length, what the booking is for and an optional note.
The chosen day and time stay in view with a Change button, and every step has its own address, so reloading the page loses nothing. The break around your own booking is marked in the grid with a dashed outline, and the legend under the grid says why. Room bookings then appear in My bookings next to events and services, and can be cancelled any time before they start.
Confirmation and messages
For each room you choose whether bookings are confirmed automatically. If they are, the person gets a confirmation right away. If not, the booking waits and the people responsible for the room get an email, a push notification and an in-app alert to confirm or decline it.
Just like with events and services, you decide which message template goes out when: the booking is waiting for confirmation, is confirmed (with a calendar invite), is declined, is cancelled by the visitor, is cancelled by you, is moved to another time, and a reminder a chosen number of hours before the start. Your first room gets ready-made templates that you can edit afterwards.
A calendar for your team
Under Rooms → Calendar your team sees the week for one room or all of them, with the bookings waiting for confirmation on top. Click a free time to book the room for a specific person (an email is enough) or to block it internally, for maintenance for example. Click a booking to confirm, decline, move, rename or cancel it.
Regular meetings do not have to be entered one by one: a booking can repeat every workday, every week or every two weeks, up to a year ahead. Before saving you see which days are already taken — those are skipped — and later you can cancel the series from any date onwards. Room bookings also show up on the dashboard, and the Visitors page has a new Rooms tab with every room’s bookings.
Through Claude or ChatGPT, too
If micali.online is connected to Claude or ChatGPT, the assistant handles rooms as well: “Who has the meeting room tomorrow?”, “Book Aurora for jana@company.com every Tuesday at nine until the end of the year.”, “Give these three people the Employees flag and send them an invitation.” Bookings and changes go through the same rules as in the app.
How to start
- Open Rooms in the menu and click New room.
- Fill in the name, description and capacity, and set the hours and the rules for visitors.
- Choose a flag (or create one right in the form) and the responsible people.
- Under Access, invite people by email and send them the link to the room.
You will find a detailed step-by-step guide in the help center.
