Organisational units
The tree everything hangs on: resources, permissions, rules and settings.
Before the first booking happens, one decision has to be made: how is your organisation cut? Organisational units are the framework everything in Zeitwart hangs on. They own the resources, services and events; permissions are always granted to a unit; settings and booking rules are inherited from it downwards.
One tree, three effects
The hierarchy decides three things at once:
Permissions – a role with booking rights on "computer labs" may book everything in that unit or below it
Booking rules – opening hours, deadlines and limits apply to everything underneath
Settings – approval procedure, contact addresses, collision check and deletion periods are inherited the same way
You therefore set a rule once in the right place instead of repeating it on thirty rooms.
Inheriting and overriding
Every unit inherits any value it does not set itself from its parent unit. At the very top sit the global defaults from the settings. A single unit can override any inherited value for itself – and release it again, so the parent value applies once more.
So that nobody is left guessing, the column defined in shows for every value where it comes from and links straight there. That explains in seconds why a change appears to "do nothing": the value is being overridden one level further down.
What a unit also carries
A unit also holds the details that become visible on the outside – contact name and address, for example, which appear in booking e-mails. Anyone administering rooms for several sites or faculties gets coherent mail per area without running a second installation.
How to cut it sensibly
The tree should follow responsibility, not the org chart. The decisive question is: who should set rules and grant approvals for these rooms? Wherever the answer is the same, a unit belongs. Trees that are too fine create maintenance work; trees that are too coarse force exceptions on every single room.
Benefits at a glance
one framework for permissions, rules and settings instead of three separate structures
inheritance downwards: one setting applies to everything below
every inherited value can be overridden deliberately and released again
the "defined in" column shows immediately where an effective value comes from
separate contact details per unit for coherent booking e-mails