Build automations

I wanted to show you something that we’ve done internally at Intuitive IT to make our lives easier. A special thanks to Gabriel Trintinalia who built this for us.

Late last year we moved to hotdesking in the Intuitive office. With hybrid working now the norm, we found being spread out across the office to be counterintuitive. When you do come into the office, you want to make sure that you’re sitting with your team so you can better communicate. So we looked at a few off the shelf systems to help us manage the desk bookings. Some were too complex, some too expensive and others just didn’t work. In the end, we decided to build our own and built it into a system we use every day. Google Chat.

So Google Chat is like Microsoft Team. It’s where most of our digital communication happens within Intuitive. Gaby created a bot that will help us book a desk. So this is how it works:

1. You start a chat with the bot
2. Tell it to bookadesk today
3. It shows you which desks are available
4. It shows you who else is in
5. Click book to book your desk

Each desk has a calendar, so once booked, it adds your booking to that calendar (to prevent double bookings) and your own.

You can perform this task from your mobile or from your computer. And this is not the only thing our bot can do.

It can read alerts from our monitoring software and alert the team.

If you paste a ticket number in the chat, it will automatically retrieve the details of the ticket so you don’t have to do look it up. Genius!

We can build automations like this for Microsoft Teams too