About CORA

Question: What is CORA ?
CORA stands for Collaborative Online Reservation Application.
It is commonly integrated into a corporate portal and empowers employees to make and manage their own room bookings... right across the enterprise.
Question: Why should I need CORA ?
…Or even, why can’t I just use my messaging system to do resource booking?

Answer:  Corporate messaging systems are just not optimised for resource booking. Setup is difficult, functionality is not what you need and worse – you may start to see performance problems and possibly even system overload!

On the other hand CORA offers all you need in a robust web based solution that is easy to setup, administer AND easy to use:

• Self-service room booking
• Booking of movable pool equipment
• Ordering of catering or extras
• Low administration overhead
• Customisable to your corporate stylesheet

Self-service room booking
Once you have more than a few conference rooms, managing the booking process can become a significant administrative overhead – especially if users keep changing their minds. Booking teams may be faced with a deep in-tray of email booking requests – or worse, a constantly ringing phone. Ensuring first-come, first-serve priority becomes increasingly difficult, and this backlog inevitably increases the response time and thereby reduces the quality-of-service to the user.

With CORA you can safely allow users to manage their own bookings, and in return they can have immediate acknowledgement of their booking requests and increased flexibility for making changes.

'With CORA, booking a meeting room yourself is as quick and easy as delegating the task to someone else!'

The system’s flexibility allows booking of multiple rooms under a single number for multi-site conferencing, or you can tell the system to recur a particular booking at selected intervals up to six months ahead. CORA automatically generates alert emails to remind users of their upcoming bookings, with the option to instantly cancel from an email link if no longer required.

Best of all, in this changing world, CORA always gives you a personal ‘My Bookings’ list which allows you to quickly and easily amend bookings yourself and add any special request, without having to go through a third-party. You can easily view your booking in context amongst others and drag it to alter position or duration contingent with availability.

Booking of movable pool equipment
In many cases, duplicating equipment in every room is uneconomic or simply inconvenient – but introducing an equipment pool brings its own challenges. CORA helps you by allowing you to impose ‘guard time’ between bookings, and offers a special report to aid scheduling equipment movements.

If you decide you need a particular piece of equipment and your chosen room doesn’t have it, you can easily augment your room booking with an available one from the pool. Alternatively, CORA allows you to just book the equipment, for use either off-site or in a private meeting room.

Ordering of catering or extras
With CORA you can quickly set up suppliers and priced menus at each location for room catering, or indeed ordering corporate gifts and the like. Users are presented with menus and a shopping basket, with everything being charged to their elected cost centre.

Low administration overhead
Consistent with a self-service approach, CORA was designed to minimise administration overhead - leaving the booking team freed up to handle special requests, moving pool equipment and fulfilling catering requirements. However, CORA does offer administrators the ability to actively manage user bookings, report on system usage and maintain configuration details – either on a country-by-country or system-wide scope. Using progressive filters allows choosing the report scope – by country, by location, by facility and for a range of dates.

Customisable to your corporate stylesheet
CORA is setup to allow you to define your own headers and footers and stylesheet to ensure it blends seamlessly into your corporate intranet (a few examples ).

What is CORA?
CORA is a robust scalable system based on Windows NT/2000, IIS and SQL Server deployed on a corporate intranet. To use CORAs in-built booking confirmation alerts requires system access to MS Exchange Server. All users and administrators interact with CORA through a standard browser interface – IE5.5 or above. CORA transparently recognises and authorises administrators and users through their domain login credentials.

Is CORA expensive?
Once you have a corporate intranet, you will generally have the infrastructure to support CORA. At this point, if you have more than a dozen conference rooms CORA will probably be a highly cost effective solution for you. You will immediately see cost savings in administration, reduced messaging complexity and great improvements in the quality-of-service to users.