Keeping track of my equipment.

October 2, 2007 10:12 AM

Simple (free?) system/software for equipment reservations and checking out?

I had trouble searching for this, I'm not exactly sure how to.

I work for a small non-profit, and we have a bunch of equipment we check out to people on a regular basis (cameras, tripods, etc.). I'm looking for a way that people can reserve dates and times that they need equipment, and easily check to see if other people have reserved equipment, who has stuff checked out, etc.

More info, if it helps: we all use macs, and we're all networked. If there's some kind of online web thing that does this, that would be awesome. Any suggestions would be super appreciated.

posted by hapticactionnetwork to Technology (4 answers total)

http://www.taskjuggler.org/

Claims to have Resource Managment by central respository. This might be overkill though. How about an Excel worksheet or Calc?
posted by zackola at 10:49 AM on October 2, 2007

Also sounds like overkill, but if you can setup SugarCRM, it looks like SugarExchange might do what you want.
posted by zackola at 10:59 AM on October 2, 2007

Google calendar has a specific mode for this. It's first come first served (unless a moderator changes it), and of course relies on the honor system for people using it.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 12:56 PM on October 2, 2007

Two parts to this: The actual reservation and the ability for others to see the current reservations.

The first part is easily answered with an online form. I've used Wufoo for this multiple times and it works great.

So now you're getting emails regularly with reservations for equipment and exact times and dates. Of course you would need to manually put that information into an online calendar like Google Calendar.

And if you want to further research tieing the two together here's a link on setting up resources in Google Calendar directly. I've never done it that way so I can't speak one way or the other.
posted by genial at 1:40 PM on October 2, 2007