A desk or room booking tool can look straightforward in a demo. The harder questions arrive when you connect identity, configure calendars and hand the system to the people who will support it.
Before choosing workplace software, agree what it must do in your environment. Use the checks below with IT, Workplace or Facilities, and the people responsible for procurement and data handling. Record the supplier’s answer, the evidence behind it and any condition attached to the quoted plan.
Start with the workflows you need
Write down the locations and resources in scope: desks, meeting rooms, parking or visitor processes. Then list the tasks employees and administrators must complete. Include the devices, identity provider and calendar clients they actually use.
A useful requirement is specific enough to test. “Integrates with Microsoft 365” leaves too much unanswered. “An employee can cancel a room reservation from the agreed client, and the room becomes available in both systems” gives everyone a clear result to check.
Compare these requirements with your existing setup. A permissions or configuration change may solve a simple problem. Our guide to shared calendars and meeting-room booking can help you frame that decision.
Separate sign-in from account lifecycle
Single sign-on, user provisioning and session revocation answer different questions. Sign-in establishes how someone authenticates. Provisioning determines how their account and permissions are created or updated. Offboarding determines what happens when their access should end.
Ask the supplier to demonstrate an authorised user, a role change and a leaver. Disable a synthetic test identity and check any existing browser or mobile session. Record how long access takes to end and what happens to future reservations. If a manual task remains, assign an owner.
Where your organisation requires MFA or conditional-access policies, test those requirements in the agreed configuration. A successful sign-in alone does not prove that every required control is operating.
Test calendar behaviour in both directions
List each supported workflow separately: create, edit and cancel. Test desks and rooms separately, too. A personal calendar entry, a room resource mailbox and a Teams availability update serve different purposes.
During the evaluation, create a reservation, change its time, add an attendee and cancel it. Repeat from every client the supplier says can manage the booking. Include a recurring series and one changed occurrence if your teams rely on recurring meetings.
Record where a change must be made and whether other views update automatically. If a direction is unsupported, make that limitation explicit in employee guidance. This avoids treating a visible calendar entry as proof that users can manage the underlying booking there.
Check who can see and change data
Use separate test roles for an employee, manager, receptionist and administrator. Check what each can view, book, change and export. Include access across sites and teams, rather than testing only a single office with an administrator account.
Ask what activity is logged, how long records are retained and who can export them. An activity feed may help with daily administration without providing every record your security review requires.
Ask for evidence with a clear scope
Request a data-flow description, hosting and subprocessor information, retention arrangements and the incident-response process. Have the appropriate internal reviewer assess these against your organisation’s requirements.
For certifications or assurance reports, check the legal entity, service covered, period and scope. Keep the document version or evidence link beside the requirement. A logo on a website does not answer those questions.
Confirm how data can be exported and deleted, including what happens to backups and records that must be retained. Record the process and any contractual conditions before the service goes live.
Include the work behind the subscription
Compare equivalent modules, resource quantities and support coverage. Ask which identity features, implementation services and integrations are included in the actual quote.
For a 12-month view, add recurring software and support costs, one-off implementation and hardware, migration and training, and estimated internal administration time. Separate additional licence costs from licences already paid for. Keep assumptions visible and avoid comparing totals in different currencies.
Microsoft Places is one option to assess alongside existing tools and specialist platforms. Its licensing requirements vary by feature and resource type. Use Microsoft’s current licence guidance when defining the scope, rather than relying on an older comparison or discussion.
Agree who supports the rollout
Give the proposed administrator a few ordinary tasks during the pilot: add a resource, update a floorplan and change a booking rule. Record the permissions, guidance and effort needed.
Before cutover, assign ownership for setup, migration validation, employee communications, support escalation and rollback. Include Workplace or Facilities in decisions about late arrivals, no-shows and booking exceptions. Those rules affect the employee experience as well as the technology.
Make the decision from recorded results
Choose the mandatory requirements before testing starts. For each one, record the expected result, observed behaviour, evidence and reviewer. Leave unanswered questions open. A failed mandatory requirement needs a fix or an explicitly accepted exception; several successful tests do not cancel it out.
A short, representative pilot helps the buying group agree what works, what still needs attention and who owns the next step.
Use the IT Approval Pack
The pack gives you a structured set of approval questions and a decision record. Use it alongside the editable workbook to compare requirements, costs, migration tasks and pilot results.